We all want it. Millions in the world seem to want it. People crave it. What is it?
It’s a home.
The cliché goes, “home is where the heart is.” People can spend years searching for home, moving from place to place. Home is where objects invoke memories in the house. That couch is where my family spent movie nights throwing popcorn at each other. That driveway is where I learned to ride a bike. That porch is where we had barbecues. Home is special because it’s where you live, play, love. For me, it’s a lot of places.
For the first 18 years of my life, I didn’t have to search for home. I grew up in the same house my great grandparents built in 1947 when they emigrated from Europe. I slept in the same room my mom grew up in and cooked in the same kitchen as her mother and her mother before that. I never had to experience making a house a home, because our four walls had been a home for many decades.
I never had to move until I found myself living in three different places other than my family home in the span of a year and a half. Because of that, I learned something invaluable. The cliché that says “home is where the heart is” is true, but maybe not as expected, because your heart can be in many different places.
I once believed home could only be where your whole heart was, and for most of my life, my whole heart was in one home with my family. Then, I moved to college. It was the first time I had to put my belongings in boxes, load up the car and go somewhere with all my stuff. I went somewhere I had never been before.
I encountered white-painted brick walls in my new home and, my gosh, I didn’t know how to feel. I had spent my whole life up until that point in one place, creating memories, and now I had the daunting task of making this dorm room in Engstrom my new home.
And it was, but not for long. I made the mistake of thinking that this room—with the heavy metal door that wouldn’t compromise with a door stop—had to consume my whole heart in order for it to be my home.
As God would have it, a short time later, I packed a suitcase for South Africa. This foreign country was the new place that I would call home. Again, I was determined to make it so. It wasn’t the pictures I put up on the walls of my friends and family that made it home. It was the cleaning workers that would joke with us over our bad Zulu. It was the night my entire cohort stayed up to play werewolf one last time instead of packing up for our flight home. It was the little girl in the village who stole my heart.
Then, I moved again. This time back to Azusa, back to APU into a mod. This little yellow mod is everything a home should be. The semester is only half over and I already have incredible memories of dropping just-made dinners on the kitchen floor with my roommates, lounging on the couch while yelling at Ben “The Bachelor” on TV and hosting random dance parties when we should have been studying.
Each one of these places became a home for me, and it’s unfair to say that they cannot each contain a piece of my heart. Home is not where the entire heart is because pieces of my heart have been left behind in every place I have lived. I will always have multiple homes.
These will always be homes to me:
The house I grew up in, with all the memories I have of my family. Inside the halls of Engstrom, where I would wander between rooms making some of the closest friends I have today. The African Enterprise campus in South Africa, where I would joke with Pindy in extremely broken Zulu. And my mod where my roommate and I make dinner every night while listening to Frank Sinatra records.
I will never again believe that home is just one place.
The house that I’ll raise children in someday will be my home, just like how visiting my parents and hopefully going back to South Africa one day will be like coming home.
Sometimes in the search for the perfect home, people may not realize that they have already found it.
Multiple times.