The Book of Me – Written by You is a weekly blog prompt created by Julie Goucher of the blog Angler’s Rest. This is a fifteen month writing project to highlight my life so that I will have something to leave behind for my descendants. Week twenty’s prompt is – The Feeling of Home.

Home means different things to different people, so this week we are going to explore what it means to us:

• What does it feel like?
• How do you recognize it?
• What makes it home? People? Place? Time?

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For me, I have two homes: the geographical location where I was born and grew up, and where I live now.

Former movie theatre (Image via Google)

The first, where I was born, is Massachusetts and the surrounding New England states. No one in my family lives there now so I do not have a family house to return to for a visit. Where one comes from shapes many aspects of one’s psychology. I still think of myself as a New Englander. The landscape and the attitudes of the people from a place stay with you when you move away. There is a sense of familiarity when you return and it is not necessarily something you can put into words. When I returned to New England last summer, I did experience the feeling of coming home. It was my first visit in over 15 years. Many things had changed physically. The downtown area of my city has been remodeled extensively since I lived there. The movie theatre where my husband and I went on our first date is no longer a movie theatre, but the building still stands. My graduating high school class purchased a stone monument to adorn the front walk of the campus. The stone endures but is now covered by overgrown shrubs and flowers. Time moves on but the connection remains.

Graduating class gift

My second and present home is where I live with my family: my husband and my children. I do not think it would matter where we lived specifically as long as we were together. On the surface, I think of home as the place where I can put my feet up and relax at the end of the day, and where I keep my stuff. But for me, the expression “Home is where the heart is” says it all. And that goes for both my homes.

©2014 copyright owned and written by Deborah Sweeney
Post originally found at: https://genealogylady.net/2014/01/17/book-of-me-pro…eeling-of-home/