What Does “Home” Mean to You?

What Does “Home” Mean to You? by The Elephant's Child

December 15, 2022, 6:49 pm
Filed under: Politics

What does the word “home” mean to you? Is is the house where you currently live? The town you think of as “Home” or your “hometown”? Is it instead the house where you were born and grew up? The town in which you were born, or county, or state? Home is a big loaded word for all of us, with many different meanings. One simple four-letter word with so many different meanings and attached emotions.

Mostly, I think, we aren’t even talking about the same thing. People who have gone to live elsewhere often think of the new “elsewhere” as home, or wherever they reside as “home.” My “home” is the place where I was born and grew up, now owned by others and unavailable to me, yet in my head that is still “home.” A loaded word indeed. The one thing you can count on is that it is a word deeply connected to a feeling of belonging and in a way — permanence. I still dream about it. Remember every inch of the property.

Have had lots of houses in lots of different locations since I grew up, but “home” remains in Idaho, where I was born and where I mostly grew up. Four-hundred acres with three miles of free flowing river bordering national forest. Lived in lots of different houses in several different states, all in the west. Besides Idaho, I have lived in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and many different locales in those states, visited lots of the rest of the country, but lived only in the West. And only that small portion of the state of Idaho was “home.”

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