Home Is Where the Heart Is Where do you consider home? Is it the place you were born or is someplace that you lived in for a while. I think its always interesting when people ask where I'm from, because for a variety of good reasons I could say a few different cities. I could say Michigan, or San Diego (because thats where my parents live and when I go home I go there) or I can say Colorado, because this is where I intend to stay for a while and have lived here for 6 out of the last 10 years. If I had to pick between the three I'd say Colorado. I feel comfortable here.
For me it is where I grew up and currently live. It is a coastal town, when I was at university at wasn't in a coastal city. I don’t ever think I cannot live by the ocean, I love the smell of salt air, it is so refreshing. The outside door in my office from where I currently type this is 15feet away, from there I can literally throw a baseball and hit Pacific Ocean. There are always ups and downs from where you live, we are probably one of the wettest spots in Canada, and we don't get sun a whole lot sometimes, which does get a little depressing at times. Since we are an coastal town so we don’t get huge fluctuations in temps, not blaze hot summers, not freeze cold winters. We don’t have earth quakes, forest fires, hurricanes, tornados, etc. But when it does get sunny out, it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. This summer was great, I put 4000kms on my bike this year, winter so far has been nice, one day of snow.
I think it's like best friends. It's not one specific, it's a tier. Home for me is Minneapolis, where I grew up. It's also San Diego, where I lived for 6+ years, or central coast California, where I plan to end up. The home you go back to after a trip and the home you go to for the holidays aren't necessarily the same place. Gun to my head, I'd say MN. It's where I'm from and where I plan to live for at least a year when I'm done out here.
I saw this online today (supposedly scribed into a bathroom stall), good timing: Overall Minnesota is my home, I feel a sense of relief once I cross over the state line after traveling. From Pipestone to Grand Portage, it all feels like home in some way. My family first moved to Mankato from southern Illinois when I was 1 1/2 years old and I lived there 'til I moved up here for college. I've been a resident of Minneapolis for six years now, love it here, and plan on staying here in the near future, but Mankato always feels like my real hometown when I visit. My parents no longer live in the houses I grew up in but it's in the same neighborhood we first moved to and I like that.
I has lived in this frighteningly clean jerkwater berg my entire life, but for a few glorious months in Calgary, the best city in the country. I fucking WISH I could call that town home but then again, everyone wishes that.
I guess I call my home South Florida. Even though I never liked it there. I don't feel like I fit in with the people. Even though I've lived in Houston since 2009, I don't really call this place my home even though I'm a Texan on paper. I think my sense of never really finding comfort in the places I've lived contributes to my sense of restlessness and tendency to be nomadic. I'm always job hunting in places that I think I would like to live, like North Carolina, Colorado, and various places in New England. Minnesota seems like a really cool place if you can stomach the winters. But I alway feel like I am constantly searching for home. The problem is, I just don't know what that feels like.
My home is absolutely where I live now, which also happens to be my home town. The wife and I bought a house only a couple of blocks from my parents' house where I grew up, so I know my town like the back of my hand, and I've lived there for 22 of my 31 years. That said, my wife and I constantly talk about moving back to West Lafayette, where we both went to college, because we like the town and area so much more than Northwest Indiana. The county I live in is kind of a pit, and the rest of the state hates us. Lafayette just felt more comfortable and "like home" in more of an adult way. We came of age there, and I worked my first real job there and we lived on our own for the first time down there, so we talk a lot about making the move, but we also don't want to leave the our parents behind, as they make excellent babysitters and they adore our daughter. TL; DR: I still live in my "home town" and it is my "home," but the wife and I really want to move. We just feel too many ties to this town to do it.
I still call my parent's house outside of Milwaukee "home". Chicago is also home. I get back to Milwaukee enough and am the house at least once a month that it doesn't feel foreign. My youngest sisters still live there, so its not a detachment yet. And considering we moved the summer after I was a senior in HS, my room was never a "childhood" room, so its more or less unchanged cause it was always half a bedroom and half a guest room of sorts. And since my parents have a full guest suite in the basement, my room is untouched. I'm always amused, and kind of disturbed, by how quickly people disassociate themselves from the homes where they grew up. I guess everyone's family situation is different, but to hear people I knew grew up in good families and stable childhoods talk about "going to my parent's house" for a holiday instead of "going home" when they were less than a year out of college is weird.
There's lots to love about Calgary, the city I call home. If I end up here for the rest of my life I'll be happy. However, the coast is calling me and a move to Vancouver Island may be in the works in the next few years (provided I can land a comfortable government job). I stopped calling the Greater Toronto Area (where I grew up) home a few years ago. While that's where the majority of my family live, I stopped missing it just a few months after I move here.
Focus: This one is tough for me. I left Wyoming as a junior in high school and moved to Colorado without my parents 8 years ago. They still live in the same house I grew up in and my room is exactly the same as it was the day I left, posters and all. However, after going back to Wyoming for the holidays this year, it no longer feels like home. I never felt like I fit in there and I still don't. Besides a few people that I'm friends with on facebook, I don't talk to anyone back there except my family. I moved to Oklahoma for law school after living in Colorado for 5 years and Oklahoma definitely doesn't feel like home. I have no roots here and know no one besides my classmates and girlfriend's friends. So, I guess I call Colorado home. I keep in touch with a few people there but many of my friends from college moved away from the Denver/Boulder area afterward. Even though I didn't grow up there, it's where I went to college and came of age I suppose. My parents also have a condo in Denver where I prefer to spend my time during holiday breaks. That a long winded way of saying the Denver/Boulder area is home. Generally, when I refer to home that's the place to which I'm referring.
The outlying Chicago area will always be home to me, but not with the weather the way it is now. It might touch 70 in Vegas today. I can live without "home" for all but two weeks a year...
With my job and my family moving countries when I was 14 I've lived in a lot of different places. Most of them I haven't felt like more than a transient just drifting through. New Zealand will always be home no matter where in the world I go or who I'm with. I may come to love another place as home and in the end most places are easily bearable if you have the right people around you but every time I'm back in NZ it just feels right.
Southern Texas. "The North" means Dallas. The beach has as much tar as it does sea shells. I learned to ride a horse bareback before I could drive (yes, some of us fulfill the stereotype). "Bilingual" isn't really a thing to put on your resume because everyone just assumes you can speak English and passable Spanish. Your "dress shoes" are a pair of black cowboy boots which you haven't shined in years. Mexican food is the standard, any other cuisine during the week is a treat. You have your professional-speak and then your at home/drunk drawl (it's kinda like code-switching). You feel actual empathy at the rodeo for both the cowboys and the carnies. And we have some of the best school systems in the country.
In the past I would have said Cleveland, but since most of my friends are moving away or gone and the only family members I want to talk to don't want to talk to me, nope, fuck that place. Never going back. When I lived in Korea that was my home. Never had friends more true in my life. Germany is cool and all but I've been here a relatively short period of time. When I first got here I thought I could live my life here but as time has gone on and the honeymoon period wore off I'm seeing that as less likely, but maybe. So nowhere presently.
I've bounced around the states pretty well and once I joined the Navy it took me all over the place. I was stationed on a carrier home ported in Yokosuka, Japan, so that place is like a second home to me. I could still give people directions around the town even though I haven't been there since '08. All said and done, I'd have to say both North and South Carolina are home for me. I've lived all over both of them and there really is no other place like it.
Texas is home. Arlington...though I'm a country girl and need to go up to the parents' farm now and again. But physically, home is where my family is...and for now that's Baltimore/DC area. But HOME is where I go to refuel my soul.
I haven't lived in New York in about five and a half years, but I don't think ill ever stop referring to it as home. Went back for a wedding recently and I always said I was going home when I talked about the trip. It's where I grew up and I just feel like I fit in a little better back there so that's probably why. I sort of find it weird that I do it, but don't see it changing anytime soon.
I was an army brat, so I grew up in various places. My home base was Savannah, GA because my mom's family was there and we visited frequently. I haven't been there in years though, when my grandmother died the family stopped having regular get-togethers. I've been a Virginia resident since 1988 and in high school, so I've spent most of my life in this state, in various parts of it. I plan to be in our current house another ~8 years until my kid graduates high school and goes off to college. After that I'm not sure. If we decide to still live in this metro area, we'll move to a different county where we can get more land for our $$$. If my daughter goes to a college in VA, I'll probably stay for that long. A lot can happen in 8 years, who knows at that point what my job will be like, what my husband's job will be like. Currently he could live anywhere that has an airport because his job is wherever the customer is. We may even move to Charlotte where his company is based because he might have more opportunities in the company that way. There's also Chicago where his daughter lives.