What makes home home? It's a question I've been thinking about for a few days now, churning it over with my wife and parents as something interesting to consider as we're planning on moving home to New Hampshire in 2 months time. As I sit here in the chaos of the redecoration and fix up of our current home, it makes me wonder what it is that makes this place home.
The thought process first started last week when I took the bus to work instead of driving. There's no direct route, so I had to go into Leeds down the Otley Road, which always feels like time travel back through my university days. The bus then goes into town (which we visit far less regularly now that we have kids) and I know where everything is, or at least the important things, like Fuji Hiro and North Bar. Everything is automatically familiar which definitely qualifies Leeds as home, and has done for a considerable number of years. I came here in 2001 and never left, spending almost half of my entire life in this city. It feels strange that I will leave it behind, and I know that part of my brain will retain all my mental maps and shortcuts forever.
Leeds is also home because it's where my urban family live. Despite a slow migration to London, Bristol, the Wirral and further flung locations, these friends have been our support network for as long as I've been in Leeds and have been there through our triumphs and struggles, the start of our family and the final decision to make the move. I couldn't have asked or wished for a better group of people around me and it will be (aka already is) heartbreaking to think that they won't be as immediately accessible as they are now. I'll leave that concept for another post (and because it'll make me sad if I continue on that train of though), but suffice to say that home is where your support network is.
Home is also where you live, but I guess that depends on the affection you have for the house. Leeds is home, and I will miss the city terribly. My friends are home, and I will miss them terribly. Our house is our home, but I won't miss it (apart from the enormous kitchen, and our super comfy bed). A few people have asked whether I'll be sad to sell our first house as a married couple and where Jake and Sophie grew up, but to be honest, we've outgrown it, both physically and mentally. The knowledge of what we can buy in New Hampshire combined with having four people in a relatively small house means that whilst the house is where we live, I won't be sad not to call it home.
Other people I've talked to have the notion that home is where your loved ones are. My mum in particular defines home as wherever my dad is (how sweet after 42 years of marriage!) and that makes sense to me as it lines up with my feelings about my friends and my own family. I'll always feel safe, comfortable, loved and wanted when I'm surrounded by my wife and kids, and it doesn't really matter where in the world we are when we're together. It feels odd, though, calling a group of people home, but I guess that home can be more of a notion than a place. It may just be that wherever my little family is where home feels like.
England, Leeds, our friends, my family - all of these places I call home now. My wife use home interchangeably to mean New Hampshire and Leeds (and strangely I can tell the difference between the two when she's talking!) and I wonder if I will get to the same point. I highly doubt that if all of our friends currently in Leeds were to leave that we'd come back to visit the city and my old haunts regularly, but I do know that I've set aside money to rent a big house somewhere in the UK each summer to get our friends and family together in one place. That won't be home in a permanent sense, but the feeling of belonging will make it so.
It will be interesting to see when, perhaps if but more likely when, New Hampshire feels like home and when I start to call it home.
Very interesting. Crazy to think you have lived nearly half of your life in Leeds. Sometimes seems like only yesterday we all moved! I also class myself as a bit of a nomad. Born in Edinburgh, raised in Northumberland, twenties in Leeds and then a new chapter in the Wirral (not Liverpool by the way!) I agree that 'home' is wherever your friends and family are. But nevermind, Wirral will be your new home soon enough....Mwah ha ha ha!
ReplyDeleteDuly edited! Where do you consider home to be then?
ReplyDeleteNicola just referred to the AirBnB we're staying in for the first month in Sydney as "home"... it's a strange word. It's not "home home" but for now, it is home. And I guess that's an important distinction that you develop as you travel and move around. "Home Home" for Nicola will always be Leeds, and "Home Home" for me will always be Holyport, but "home" I think is the place that is currently the most homelike, whether that's a hotel room on a work trip, a weird little air bnb where Nic is currently killing spiders or somewhere you plan on living / staying for 3, 5 or 20 years.
ReplyDeleteour air bnb is definitely not home-home home, but its getting there as home for now. There have been a few things that make it not home-home (other than a distinct lack of dogs, an insufficient number of Monks within a 1 mile radius, and the fact that it appears at most times to be hotter than the sun). I think quite a few of them which sit outside of the family/friends part of the diagram can be categorised as:
ReplyDelete1 - compromises I'm not technically willing to make, but it'll have to do for now
and
2 - man alive we are foreign - stuff here is weird
for compromises I'm not technically willing to make, they are generally pretty transient and materialistic concerns. The bloody useless wifi, the battles with the terrible blinds and the sketchy air con setup. we're living here for a month, so we will make do and I will try not to grumble (too much!). Our new adventures into the world of freecycle will help acquire things which will ensure our new home-home is comfortable fairly early on, as will a Big Shop at Ikea. We won't have to make these compromises for too long, but lots of people don't have that luxury, and so I count myself as very lucky to feel that my material and comfort based aspirations for home-home are attainable in the medium term.
the feeling of foreign-ness is generally far more entertaining. most days so far I have taken terrible photos of weird and wonderful creatures in our garden (today rainbow lorikeets) and we have had adventures round the massive westfield (not so foreign) to find a 'coffee plunger' (cafetiere) and 'cordial' (squash of all kinds) which comes in a bottle that in my British mind should by rights contain bleach or other hazardous chemical. Kelsey very wisely pointed out that no matter how long we are here, foreign oddities will keep cropping up, and so I will continue to enjoy them as a reminder that we have several home-homes which will welcome us back at a moment's notice.
Half your life lived in Leeds. That gave me pause for thought - by contrast I reckon I've lived in six houses in four towns in three countries since I left Leeds six years ago.
ReplyDeleteI agree it's that "feeling of belonging" which makes a home a home... although that can throw up some weird situations. When I moved to Bath I lived in one particular place for over 18 months, yet your kitchen or Matt and Vix's living room, neither of which I can have been in more than a few dozen times if that, still feel more like home to me than Chivers Cottage ever did. They actually feel just as much like home as my parents' place does... but in a completely different way.
I guess in ye olde tymes, when people didn't move around so much and you couldn't casually make a phone call to the other side of the world, where you physically lived and where your support network was were, necessarily, the same place. The world's moved on, but our - or at least my - concepts/language haven't really caught up yet.