Home is where the heart is.

I have just come back from my monthly visit to my eldest son and my best friend. They both live in Essex. Essex is where i lived with no desire to leave from 1991 - 2014. Circumstances often beyond our control cause us to move, and hard as it seems to be initially, we resettle in our new homes.... My house is a shrine to my homes. There's a sunset reflection outside my bedroom door when Alex's bedroom door is open in our current home, But i remember the sunshine in Essex, as well as in Broadgreen where i grew up as the sun hid behind the houses in the next road - lots of three bedroom semi's of the bay window variety... The sunshine in Belsize Park where i spent my first year as a grown up, away from Liverpool, learning how to be independent... Always our memories of home are when we are in a high emotive state and why we can recall them to clearly. The nurses home in Epsom, where i homed my skills and became a registered nurse, my memories again, are of the sunshine and lying outside in the sunshine with t shirts and shorts - something that seemed alien to me, as it was not considered the thing to do in the big city... My mother would certainly have given me something to do, to prevent me sitting in the garden! Brighton was another sunshiny memory, the beaches, the fun as a single young thing, newly qualified, parties and discos... Tillingham was the sunniest of my memories and when the boys were tiny, we enjoyed summers walking down to the sea wall, taking picnics, looking at where the hole at the side of the lane was for the route to "neverland" Many happy times. I considered every one of those places my home at one time or another, whether it was for months or years. For many people, their home is part of their self-definition, which is why we do things like decorate our houses and take care of our lawns. As this is a particularly wet summer, I am cutting the lawns and digging up weeds every five days - it was every two weeks down south! These large patches of vegetation serve little real purpose, but they are part of a public face people put on, displaying their home as an extension of themselves. It's hardly rare, though, in our mobile modern society, to accumulate several different homes over the course of a lifetime. So how does that affect our conception of ourselves? For better or worse, the place where we grew up usually retains an iconic status, Liverpool to me, is not the prettiest of places, but it holds its own - i love it. However, whilst it's human nature to want to have a place to belong, we also want to be special, and defining yourself as someone who once lived somewhere more interesting than the Rocket in the 1970's, is one way to do that. you might choose to identify as a person who used to live somewhere else, because it makes you distinctive. I know full well that living in London for four years doesn't make me a Cockney, but that doesn't mean there's not a fridge magnet of London on the fridge! We may use our homes to help distinguish ourselves, but the dominant Western viewpoint is that regardless of location, the individual remains unchanged. In the modern Western world, perceptions of home are consistently coloured by factors of economy and choice. There's an expectation in our society that you'll grow up, buy a house, get a mortgage, and jump through all the financial hoops that home ownership entails, It's true that part of why my home feels like mine is because I'm the one who always paid for it! not my parents, though my parents helped... That kind of economic system is predicated on marketing people to live in a different home, or a better home than the one they're in. I know the most important thing for me was to buy a house and get on the property ladder - I bought my first house at the age of 21 - i needed that financial security, even then! It is something i always instilled in my children - and my second son is about to embark on his first house at the age of 25 years with a hefty deposit paid for by us, to help him along his journey. The endless options of when to sell and buy the next house can leave us constantly wondering if there isn't some place with better schools, a better neighbourhood, more green space, and on and on. We may leave a pretty good thing behind, hoping that the next place will be even more desirable. Not always knowing the area we are moving to can be a pot luck situation, but property will never go down in value (as my mother continually instilled into me - buy bricks and mortar!) - she was right! In some ways, this mobility has become part of the natural course of a life. The script is a familiar one: you move out of your parents' house, maybe go to nursing college and university as i did, get a place of your own, get a bigger house when you have children, then a smaller one when the children leave home, then in my case, a bigger one with the second family and the children returning home on boomerangs, It is not a bad thing, and i know we are thinking bungalow land is only 15 years down the road!! But in spite of everything, in spite of the mobility, individualism, and the economy, on some level we do recognise the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, we recognise lilts in accents, We ask, not just to place a pushpin for them in our mental map of acquaintances, but because we recognise that the answer tells us something important about them. My answer for "where are you from?" is usually Liverpool, but 29 years away... If home is where the heart is, then by its most literal definition, my home is wherever I am. I've always been liberal in my use of the word. If when i was younger i was going to visit my mum, it was described as "Im going home to see mum" - even though i lived down south... Memories, too, are cued by the physical environment. When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. Decompartmentalised - The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist. I can't possibly live everywhere I once labelled as my home, but I can frame these places on my walls. My decorations on the fridge and postcards in the study, serve as a reminder of the more adventurous person I was in my teens, the more carefree person i was in London and before i had children. No one is ever free from their social or physical environment. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are. When i visit my son and best friend, it is a journey i am so used to, i enjoy it, i remember all the fun times we had whilst the children were growing up, but i love coming back home. Home is where the heart is.