A Love Letter to my Home

Dear Home Sweet Home of Mine,

It’s true what they say, you’re not like the other homes. You have no roof to protect my head, no fire to warm my feet on wintry nights, no doorbell.

You don’t have that list of numbers and letters that so many homes do. No address, no area code.

Many who can’t see your four walls may guess that you don’t exist. For a while I wondered about this possibiilty too.

Having never lived in one house for more than 4 years, did I have a home? If I did, where was it? What did it look like? What did it smell like? Was it hidden?

What the others do not know, what I discovered is that you, unlike the other homes, do not have four walls, because you are a shapeshifter.

A shapeshifter, that’s right. You truly are a marvel!

You are not a location, or a person, a city, or even an entire country.

While you can take the form of any of these things, for a time or in a given place, you are encompassed by none of them.

When I came to the realization of this fact, it was easy to see your footprints traipsing through my childhood and hear the echoes of your voice in the words that I speak today.

You were in the arms of my mother after a long school day, in the smiles of welcoming strangers when I was an immigrant in a new land and  in the wafting smell of pancakes that my Grandma made, every morning that I spent in her house on Washington Avenue.

As I grew you were continually woven through my life, like a single thread in an intricate tapestry. I would see a glimpse of you in the generosity of the Northern Irish people only to hear you in the ‘Welcomes’ of my family members when I returned to Fremont California.

I found you printed on pages, in the lyrics of my dad’s favorite eighties songs, in the warm tea friends offered me everytime I entered their homes.

Thank you for growing, changing and shifting with me. As I make some changes in my life I like to think about what kind of shape you will take next. Will I find you in the eyes of others, in the sound of my name on someone’s lips, in the winding of a new street?

The answers to this question are endless and unknowable but there is one thing I am certain of...

I am grateful. Grateful that you are not 4 cold walls and a mailbox. Grateful that you are a shapeshifter and grateful that I have found you on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, with people of different ages, genders, races and names... in sounds, in views, in feelings and in food.

Here’s to many more years of finding you, right under my nose!

Thank you for being my home sweet home!