What is HOME to you?

While driving through this most beautiful August day and on my way home from work, my thoughts once again swirled around this subject.

What IS “home”?

Is it where you know you can close the doors and nobody bothers you? Or is it where your family is? Is it where people not only talk your language but also understand your viewpoints? Or is it where your heart yearns to be? Or where the memories of the past are more good than bad? Is it the place you are not able to let lose or is it where you grow solid? Is it where you feel safe?

As long as I was living in Switzerland, these questions never came to my mind. But I do remember back when I tested my wings and when I called Paris my home, that it felt like that, like home… yes, I probably would still be living there if it would not have been for the hard to get work permits at the time. Switzerland and Paris, yes, these 2 places definitely where “home” to me.

In less than 2 months I’ll be living for 11 years here in the US. A citizen.

My house feels like “home”. But people here still don’t. New York instantly did. There was a spot on the highway in Minneapolis – when the 2 radio towers became visible – that always triggered that feeling of “coming home” in me, as I knew it would be only another 5 or 10 minutes before entering our garage. Suburbia doesn’t feel like home, no matter how much I love my neighborhood. Family here is now “my family”, but in the end it remains ‘his family’, it can never replace my own, “real family”.

But way to soon I’ll be the oldest in that tribe, and once all my tight, tight ties like parents, uncles and cousins are gone – where then is my “home”? Usually people create their own by having and raising children. Not so here. And even my family “back home” as I remember and as I feel it is disintegrating and a lot of it has gone by age, separation and death.

Switzerland, Baden, Zürich, Wengen and Paris will remain always “home” – but with people gone, a large part of that “home” is solely based on fond memories and a melancholy as these times and people constellations have passed and will be no more.

I do not know where I will feel “home” in 20 years.

One thing though that I know for sure is that I am grateful to have had all these “home”s and that fond memories like that make me suck-in and inhale warm summer days as this one to the last drop.