Home.

Home sweet home.

Home is where the heart is.

Home is where you lay your head.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Nice one, Rob Frost. I think I like that one—like a proverbial insurance policy.

Home is an interesting concept. There is no concrete position of home. You can’t find home on a GPS, now matter how that little Tom Tom tries. Home is an abstract reality that one creates to satisfy the need for belonging, the need for refuge. It is often a place of biological reference and often a dwelling for all the loves of your life, be they human, animal or mineral.

When I get a call from my parents’ house, my caller id rightfully says home. Now it would be ridiculous to say the house was calling me. Houses don’t make phone calls, unless it was one of the houses of the future where all the appliances talk to you. Maybe those houses make…house calls…So it is not the house calling. It is my home.

Actually, when home calls it also plays O.A.R.’s “I Feel Home,” which is rather appropriate. It works because it was the place I grew up in that holds all my memories of life before adulthood. But it also works because the comfort I find from the home that is the actual structure, I also find in the home that is the voice on the other line.

The apartment I live in right now is getting to be home. Walls need to be fixed with mud and paint. Ceilings need patching. But it won’t be the renovations that do the trick. It’s what is in those boxes that still need to be unpacked. Pictures of family. Frames filled with friends. Drawings from my old roommates that will hang on the walls. Funny notes from work. Memories from back in the day, tid bits from lifetimes before this one.

My office is my home. Lots of things that I love are there. I feel like I belong. My friends are my home. I find strength in them. My family is definitely my home. They are proof. Home gives me a place to come from and a place to go to when reality is a troubling destination or some place too amazing not to share.

Your home may be in your pet or in your music. Home could be in the finger paintings on your refrigerator or the dent in your car that tells quite a funny story. It could be in an old movie …that could possibly be playing in our Summer Movie Classics series…maybe? Sundays at 2 pm? No?

But seriously, I think Oliver Wendell Holmes may have summed it up best, “Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” Looking at the clock now, it is a bit past 5. Ah, time to go home...wait, I’m already there.