Home

The place where your heart settles and your soul can finally relax

What is home for you? Have you thought about it? I mean really thought about it?

For many people, it is the structure where they live, the house that holds their possessions, the location where family members collect now and then to eat, sleep, fight, or watch the big screen television. It’s simply a place. An address on a mailbox.

It is a physical location taken for granted, stressed over when the mortgage payment is due, complained about when the grass needs cutting, and decorated a bit, but only when the Jones family next door decorates theirs.

They don’t think about it. It’s just where they live.

For some folks, it is where they were born, the small town they lived in all their lives, a place they could never think of leaving. It is a place down the street from Meemaw and them that holds their friends, book club, favorite restaurants, the family they still speak to, and all the familiar memories they hold dear.

Maybe it's the loft apartment in the large city where they moved after college that gives a person everything to do at all hours of the day and night to chase the loneliness. The place where they never have to face themselves because they are always too busy.

For some, home is where they feel trapped, where their escape is planned every minute of every day. It is the place they will wipe from their minds once they are gone, like dust from a chalkboard, and never think of it again.

Even though my life blasted full speed, I thought about it now and again. Years ago, my mentors told me never to get emotionally attached to real estate. It is only a house, land, or a building, a commodity to be bought and sold, not something to be loved or cherished. I’ve bought many in my lifetime and have never been attached except for one. They were just places decorated for curb appeal and for resale at some point in the future. I’m a real estate lawyer. It’s how I made my living.

Even so, I’m one of those persons who has to “feel” a place before they will consider living there. Even though real estate may be my living, I needed to feel the town, feel the neighborhood, and glean the vibes from the actual house or apartment. (One day, we’ll discuss everything I did before buying a house in Key West, Florida.) I walk everywhere and take my time. It has to feel right before I’ll think about buying it. (Feel it, but don’t get attached, remember.) If you don’t like the way it feels, neither will your buyer down the road.

The meaning of home did not become important until my last flight into Charleston airport several years ago when I grabbed a taxi for that last leg home. Home. It sure didn’t feel like home. Then again, what was I expecting home to feel like?

The taxi turned the corner to head over the causeway to the island where I lived for nine years. When passing the familiar buildings—the restaurants, the drug store, the old white barn of a beach house I’d rented to vacationers—it wasn’t home. It was where I lived, worked, walked the beach, and experienced life, but there was no “home” there. Not really.

Of course, my family was there sometimes, but they had their own lives, expectations, and adventures. I was approaching the new life of an empty nester with the possibility of home being anywhere in the world.

Then, seemingly overnight, they grew into adults and learned to fend for themselves. They are always in my heart, just as I know I am in theirs. A part of me is “home” when they are with me, regardless of where we are. I am comfortable that they are adults and can live without my parenting. They need their freedom, knowing that I will always have a place for them to live that they can call “home.” But they have to make their own.

Still, something was missing. Something that had nothing to do with my family, a structure, or where I slept each night. I was missing something about home deep within my soul that went missing long ago.

I remember my parents standing at the top of the gently sloping hill on the one hundred acres my father bought before I started first grade, planning their future and how they saw the land. It was their vision, their life. Learning how to farm in elementary school is something you think everyone does when you’re that age. You think all families live like this, with dirt between their toes in the long hot summers, planting seeds one by one in long rows, watermelons burst on the ground to eat with your fingers, tomatoes for lunch fresh off the vine, and cows flapping their ears nearby as they wait for their part of the juiciness. You think everyone can jump off the dock to cool off in the river at the end of every day.

I had that life until I was twelve, when my father died. After that, things began to change. It was too much work for my mother alone, and before I knew what was happening, the farm was gone. Once I left high school, I never went back. It was too painful to see someone else living at “our place.”

Realizing I may never see that place again, I drove to Alabama a few years ago. I think we all unrealistically expect the places of our childhood never to change. I’ll never forget the feeling of coming over the rise where our property began and seeing what used to be our beautiful rolling pasture with a large pond. This pasture was where I learned to ride my sister’s horse. My dad stocked the pond with fish and taught me to catch them with a cane pole. The thick green pasture held thirteen black Angus cattle so fat that my feet stuck out sideways like broomsticks when sitting on them as a child.

Now, it is a subdivision with houses. After the emotional punch in the gut, I cried.

Searching for a home that fills the missing piece of my soul has been a great exploration. I’ve fallen in love with travel while discovering what home means to others. I’ve been all over the U.S. and Europe (find those posts in the archive here), and we’re about to visit parts of South and Central America. The search has helped me to write again.

Yet, while places can be beautiful, they must fill that missing element for me to consider it home. So what is it? How can I explain this?

When I get off the plane after a long trip, I need to experience something that feels a lot like hope—not just the comfortable feeling of being in a familiar location but the sudden surge of happiness and contentment, followed by a longing to be there as quickly as possible. It needs to have all the familiar smells and sounds, the familiar sights that make me soar, knowing I am about to be in my happy place. When I open the door, it needs to smell—like home.

My words are failing me today, but do you get the picture?

Miami, for example, is a great place, but it’s still not home, even through all the construction pain and the “making it mine.” It’s a family pit stop. A safe place on the way to somewhere else, whether for a few days, a month, or several years. I'm happy to be here when I get off the plane at MIA. I like the airport even though the locals complain about it. It’s comfortable. When I step outside, the familiar humidity slaps me in the face, and the sun is shining (for the most part). But there’s no urgency to get here or that feeling of having arrived somewhere you wish you’d never left.

After removing my shoes at the apartment, I sink into the couch and watch the boats in Biscayne Bay before heading to the pool. It’s almost like being in an Airbnb you’ve visited many times. Quiet, comfortable, and you know what to expect. But home? Not really. Maybe it will be after our dinners, laughter, new friends, visiting family, and memories.

“So get to the point,” you say.

It wasn’t until my husband made me a deal two years ago that I thought there might be hope. He’s lived as a city boy his entire life, and he wanted to have a farm. At first, I laughed. He never sits still and works harder than any man I know, but did he know how much work was involved in farming? Even one where you weren’t trying to make a living?

He’s finding out. And he’s happy. He planted a huge orchard and a vineyard, just added bee hives, and we’re about to add a chicken coop and a place for the dogs and the horse. We’re off the grid. The house has in-floor heating that I’ve wanted all my life. For an extroverted introvert/hermit like me, it’s heaven.

One of the best parts? It sits in the center of a national forest, and the village just over the hill behind us is where my husband’s Turkish family originated. Even though I’m still learning the language and there’s a lot of communication through hand gestures over dinners and chats with tea, they routinely let me know I belong and I am family.

I don’t need to ask permission to raid the huge fig tree behind the family greenhouse. I’m blonde and American, so the entire universe knows who I am. It’s hard to hide here. And if they don’t know me at first? Just telling them I’m the daughter-in-law of their favorite former resident (my father-in-law) does the trick.

Maybe community is one of the required elements of home. I’m still thinking about that part.

As I stand on the hillside when the sun sets, with the village spread below and the city of Istanbul I care so much about in the distance, and even though I don’t fully yet understand why this place fills my soul, I know that finally…

I’ve come home.