Home is where…..

Write about your dream home.

The workspace looked like a bomb shelter. I sat in the worn office chair. My laptop was in my lap. (Where else should it be?) My heavy booted leg rested on the old worn table, easing my sciatica. A latte was at my elbow in a paper cup from the shop up the road. My eyeglasses rested on the bridge of my nose as I scrolled through the reports, here at a location I was reporting to on this particular week.

She walked past with an armful of folders, gave me a glance and sneered.

“Feel free to make yourself at home!”

I looked at her and shrugged.

“I have.” I said matter-of-factly.

I am a traveler, a wanderer, a ship at sea.

I am frequently sent to different work locations for a day or two or a weeks at a time. In my personal life I have always been a tourist, a wanderer, an explorer, a transporter of people and product. I must scratch the itch to see places for work and play. When it’s been satisfied, I return to where I live. According to the government that is my “home.” It’s where my mail is delivered.

I like it there, but if it burned to the ground tomorrow, I would be fine in many other places.

Home for me is not a particular geographic location, or a structure, or even a country. It’s a place where I’m comfortable, where it’s easy to relax, that’s easy on the eyes and ears. Where you nod hello to strangers you might pass on a walk. Where respect and acceptance of cultures is a given, where courtesy and kindness are not an exception but a rule.

I don’t need fancy furniture or a large screen television. Gourmet meals or upscale restaurants are not required, nor lavishly decorated living spaces. That’s nice, but those comforters require maintenance and tie you down. I don’t want more “things.”

I do need a place to be outside. To sit and watch the sun rise from a cabin in the woods or a motel on a desert highway. To walk a beach on the windswept shores of the Outer Banks in the Carolinas, or dip a toe into the Pacific at dawn on Waikiki.

I’ve been content to drink an inexpensive instant coffee from a metal cup in a rough hiking shelter in Vermont’s Green Mountains. To sit by a smoldering fire in soggy motorcycle leathers in a run down roadside shop selling tapas in southern Spain.

All of these places feel like home. Perhaps home is not a place at all. Having nothing left to prove, no empire to build, no need to impress, maybe home is being comfortable in one’s own skin. That may be my definition of home and as such, I hope to live there forever.