Home

I lived there from the time I was seven until I left for college. It was a falling down farmhouse with an unfinished basement, unfinished second floor, poor insulation, one vent that blew warm air during the cold months, and unscreened windows that let the mosquitoes in every summer night. The mess. The stuff everywhere. The sawhorses set up permanently in the upstairs hall, as if my father would someday begin to renovate. They did their best with it, my parents did, but it was a sad building and I can't think of it now without cringing a little.

Then it was college dorm room after college dorm with occasional summers spent in off campus apartments. Always temporary, always short term, but always so much fun, so much joy, so much music left on all night to soothe me to sleep. Buying just the right amount of food to fill up the tiny microfridge. My door, complete with pictures of koalas and the prerequisite white board. The blessed clean. Never did I let clothes fall on the floor or a week go by without a vacuum cleaning the carpet. I would always cry myself to sleep the day before a break would start, knowing I couldn't stay there, knowing that I had to go back. I proudly called BG my home.

Once I graduated I took a job in a small town in eastern Michigan and rented the top floor of a house. It was a wide open space and my puny number of pieces of furniture (bed on the floor, giant pappazan chair, television stand and 19 inch television, folding card table and four folding chairs, one bookcase) made it seem even bigger. I mopped, I vacuumed, borrowing the vacuum from the people downstairs, and I cleaned every week. I was so proud of those three rooms. At Christmas I put lights up around the picture window that faced the street. It was mine. All mine. I loved that place. No one sent me home for holidays. I was lonely at times, but soon enough I made friends and I made that apartment a hub of activity and social gathering. It was my home and when I started applying to grad school and (strangely) getting acceptance letters, I dreaded leaving. I sobbed as I pulled my little S-1o out of the driveway for the last time.

When I moved to Minneapolis, I shut down. I forced myself into social gatherings with people who just weren't like me. They were nice, very nice, but it turns out that I can't hang with the very smart people. I am smart, I think. But I am not one of the intelligentsia, as proof by the fact that I had to look up the spelling of that word. My apartment became a refuge where I hid and read and watched bad tv and hated the world and cried. A lot.

I tried living with a roommate. It didn't work out for a variety of reasons. I started to feel like whatever social circle I had was eroding as people were forced to pick sides between us. If you asked me, I would still say my home was that damn farmhouse, but by this point, the farmhouse had been condemned and torn down. My parents built a new house on the same lot and I had a room there, but I had never lived there and it wasn't my home.

Now this is home. Our apartment is home. I moved in here with my fiance, I got married to him while we lived here, and we've celebrated three Christmases here together. We had the cat here for four months. We've celebrated tiny victories together in this place. It is here that I realized I had to put my grad school dreams to bed forever. We have learned to become a united front here. We fought over popcorn and putting air in bike tires here. We've become an annoying couple who finish each other sentences here. This is my home. Home is where I am with my husband. Inevitably, we will leave this place. I will sob as we lock the door for the last time and climb down those stairs.

But the next place we live will also be home. Because home is where we are, me and BB. And I'm glad I'm in a place where I can so openly admit that I'm no longer stuck wondering where home is.