What Makes a Home

The dust has settled, at long last. On Tuesday, we left our house of the last six years and moved across town to our new home, a single-story townhouse that will cut our commute to work in half, down to twenty minutes. Already, we're feeling the difference.

The move itself took place on the one day of the week on which it was raining, of course, but the movers were on time, cheerful, careful, and efficient. We were in the new place by 4:30 on Tuesday afternoon. By 8:15 Friday morning, the last box was unpacked and its contents dispersed. We devoted the weekend to hanging framed items on the walls. 

The dogs and the cats have settled in with no trouble, and we are eagerly looking forward to the arrival on Saturday of our second-born, who now lives in Minnesota. S. will be with us for a week, and it can't come soon enough.

I expected some longing, some nostalgia, a sense of missing the place we had called home for six years. It hasn't happened. From the first, the new place has felt like home. There's been no sense of transition, no feeling that we are perching temporarily in someone else's house. This is home. 

Of course, it helps that the furnishings are familiar, that we are sitting on the familiar sofa, cooking with the familiar pots and pans, drawing books from familiar shelves. But the real difference, of course, is the people. Those whom I love are close at hand, and that's what makes the place home. 

It's also interesting to have come full circle, in a sense. When the children were small (S. was only six months old), we moved into a house just a few miles away. We had a local movie theater and a local Harris Teeter. Twenty years later, we are once again going to see films at the same local theater and shopping at the same Harris Teeter. Only now the babies are grown. Maybe that's part of why the place feels so much like home - it's a coming back to a familiar area. 

In any event, we are very glad to be home at last.