My first home was a little Victorian terraced house, with narrow corridors, steep stairs, and period fireplaces - complete with a wasp nest in the chimney, but that’s a story for another time. I lived here for the first six years of my life, and have only a handful of memories of the place. The long garden our dog ran a track around. The walk-in cupboard in the kitchen which I used to hide in when playing hide and seek with my papa. The ghost I saw in my mum's room. I was elated earlier in lockdown when my dad sent over hours and hours of footage from home movies inside my childhood home. Suddenly, I remember wallpaper, carpets, the toys I played with, and the table we ate our Christmas dinner at. Sometimes I walk past the house, and it’s both alarming and warming to see how the next residents (or, the next-next residents. Next-next-next.) have made it their home. They’ve got those little shutters in a pale ash gray, slate-coloured door, and little shrubs out the front. “Welcome! This is our family home!” It cries, and I don’t know what flavour of family lives there now. I hope they’re very happy in that warm, safe place I once called home.
Now, I live somewhere else. I live with my mum and step-dad and have seen my brother move out and make his own new home. Is that what home is? The Cambridge Dictionary defines home as “the house, apartment, etc. where you live, especially with your family: the type of family you come from” and I thoroughly believe this. I have found home where I live, embracing my family after a hard day at work and in hot cups of Assam at breakfast. I am lucky, I have another home too. Home is also at my dads house, where he lives with my two beloved younger siblings and step mum. It’s a short train ride away, where there’s a fresh cup of coffee or glass of wine waiting for me (depending on the time of day!) I’ve found home in my best friend’s living room, curled up on the sofa with her and her family watching Harry Potter and eating handfuls of chocolate and feeling their belief in me: for an evening, I am home there. In her essay "What Makes a House a Home?", Megan Daum writes, “Home is an idea, a social construct, a story we tell ourselves about who we are and who and what we want closest in our midst. There is no place like home because home is not actually a place.” We all know home is a feeling, but have you ever stopped to consider where you feel it? With who? What does home smell like, taste like? Is it a worn carpet under your toes or cold kitchen tiles?
It is the feel of my sleeping cat’s thick coat, warm as he dozes by the window. It’s the sound of rain on the window and the smell of something baking in the oven. It’s the fire on in the corner. It tastes like sherried whisky.
One of my dearest friends introduced me to an excellent essay by the amazing Rachel Cusk titled “Making Home.” While I will not go into the detail it deserves here, it is well worth a read. There is one passage that has always stuck with me. It goes as follows:
"Another friend of mine runs her house with admirable laxity, governing her large family by a set of principles that have tidiness as a footnote or a distant goal, something it would be nice to achieve one day, like retirement. [...] In this house, the search for happiness appears to be complete; or rather, in the chaotic mountain of jumble it is always somehow at hand, the easiest of all things to find."
The house I live in is lovingly crafted and adorned with lovely nick-nacks, ornaments and trinkets of memories, a book is to hand on the table, alongside my half-drunk cup of coffee, a candle and a bunch of flowers. If you need a pen, give me a moment and I’ll find you one. I‘m not saying our house is wildly chaotic as in this essay, but the line about having happiness at hand is so potently touching to me. Is home where my physical mark is left? Where I can kick off my shoes, and lay back on the sofa, without worry about respectability? It’s the ultimate comfort, ultimate relaxation and ultimate unashamedness at how one enjoys living. I am most myself when I am at home. Again, as the Cambridge Dictionary defines how as “where they feel they belong.” I belong at home. I belong in many places. Do I have many feelings of home, or is it a warm soup of them all?
Home feels safe under a soft blanket. It smells like the detergent we have always used, tropical oasis. It’s a creamy, smooth cup of coffee in my favourite cup, with a book in my hand. It’s an oat and raisin cookie, holding my partner's hand, and a voice note full of laughter from a friend. It’s picking a film in the evening, pretending to resist another glass of red (oh, alright then.) It’s taking Shrek-like selfies when we’ve slathered thick face mask over myself. It’s crying until my eyes go puffy, and being supported until the pain subsides. It’s the safety to lay on the floor in my bunny onesie, and not be laughed at. It’s laughing when it‘s important to. It’s the eureka moment of finding the book I thought I’d lost. It’s the sound of the doorbell when my brother comes for a visit. It’s the clanking of keys in the little metal watering can pot We began keeping them in, long ago and long last explanation for this quirk. It’s the howl of the cat who misses us in the night time. It's singing on a Sunday to the radio at noon. It’s all this, and more. How can I tell you what feels like home, when it feels warm like everything and everyone I have ever loved. It is an accumulation of all the kindness and fondness I have felt, made physical and solid within these four walls. This is how and where I feel most myself, comfortable and peaceful. This is where I am home.