Why everyone and no one can tell you what home means

During the holiday season, many of us turn our thoughts to home. But what makes a home? This week, 19 essayists offer a look into the spaces tied to their hearts.

So, I have just read 19 essays about home, and I still could not tell you exactly what home is. This week’s cover story is all about home, with 19 contributors offering what it means to them, in keeping with the holiday season, when home is so often so dear. 

Home is a friend boldly eating chocolate-covered graham crackers on the counter. It is the summer sun in the Canadian Arctic kindling towns to activity when the clock is sending the rest of Canada to bed. It is two daughters cuddled up in bed beside their mother in the calm of the moonlit moment. 

What definition could possibly encompass all that, much less the 16 other essays, too?

The answer, of course, is none, which is why we can read essays that are both familiar and unique and still have identified only the smallest fraction of what home is. It is a friend with blue eye shadow, Grandma’s house, the awesomeness of nature, kindness, a plant in a ditch, an apple tree buzzing with bees, a cassette tape of the Grinch at Christmastime.

I have had my own journey with home this year, as my family has moved to Germany. Is Berlin home? Was Boston? 

I’m coming to the conclusion that home is what we choose to let into our hearts and cherish. I could choose to keep a running tally of all the ways Germany feels foreign. Or I can look at the people around me and say, “This is home for them,” and expand that understanding to make it home for me, too. 

Wherever I move next, I will remember the bakeries on every Berlin street corner, the irresistible scent of morning croissants coaxing the hungry sun over the horizon, the rumble of the cars on the cobblestones.

What we choose to let into our hearts reshapes us, becomes a part of us in a way that becomes home. If the snail carries its home on its back, we humans carry home in our hearts.

And what power it has. 

No one reading this week’s cover story could leave it without a sense of what mountains are moved by home. 

I think of the stories I’ve read recently in the Monitor about migrants heading for the United States or Europe. Are they leaving home? Certainly. But in the attraction of opportunity, they are also moving toward something – namely, hope. 

One of our contributors quotes a 19th-century clergyman who quipped, “Home is heaven for beginners.” It is also the beginning of hope. Home is the foundation on which our lives – the structure of all we hope for – are built. And what are the materials? Just ask any of our contributors: kindness and courage and wonder and generosity and joy and humility and heartache, to name a few. 

Home is the best of us, cherished and kept warm, and our cover story is a beautiful reminder of how that can uplift and regenerate, from a fireside hearth to a food cart in a far-off land.