Home*

I'm staring out the window of another plane.  I can't see the landscape through the clouds but I know it's there, passing beneath me.  Or rather, existing beneath me while I pass over it.

I watch the clouds, imagine the land, and wonder where is home?  What is home?

I've never been terribly discriminatory about my use of that word.  'Home.'  I guess because I don't really consider home a place, or maybe that I don't consider it a singular place.  I'm too traveled, too 'miled' for that- far too old for the luxury of staidness.  The plane I'm on at the moment reminds me of this- it's flying me from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Stavanger, Norway.  For the moment, it's flying me home.

Or is it?

Because home is Charlotte, North Carolina.  Home is Windsor, Vermont.  Home is the driver's side of a Jeep that will soon be sold to the highest bidder.  Yesterday home was an eighth floor apartment in Istanbul with a rooftop terrace and an evil washing machine.

There it is- home isn't a place.  It's a space.  It's a space that you carve out for whatever small or grand period of time for yourself.  Home is the space that you make yours.  If it's only for a day, cool- that bench is homier than any other around, or that bus seat or that plane seat on a long haul trip.  If it's for a week, even better.  Because at that point, at some point, you're walking along the streets of someplace theoretically foreign and you stop when you realize that you've bought coffee from the same hidden, hardworking vendor for the past four mornings in a row.  You're not home- but you have your own 'coffee shop on the corner.' And there it is again- you are home.

If it's even longer, then you're just lucky. New Jersey, North Carolina, Paris, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, China - all of these place have been my home.  And there are so many more.  There will be so many more.

It's not a place. My parents will move to Florida soon. And where they go, where they wind up, will not be the house I grew up in, but it will be home because of them. Vermont and New Hampshire will always be home because of the people I know there and the love I have known there.  Norway might not work out, I really don't know. But in a little while, I will be landing and making my way to an apartment with a warm, happy dog wanting to say hello…

And 'welcome home.'

And until next time… I'm home.

*I journaled this on a plane- typed it later on.