Home for the holidays

Since we moved out of my childhood house, the concept of “home” has had a really strange meaning to me. Like I’ve said before, I have an intense attachment to places, and my home on Canterbury Lane was a very hard goodbye. (Which I think literally everyone around me has noticed. I’m sorry. Thanks for dealing with me.) In general, I feel like kids who go off to college struggle with the idea of going home. I have two different lives, with different people and places involved, and I love them both. 

I dreaded the idea of going home for the holidays because I felt like I no longer had a real home to return to. And I have felt that way almost every day while being in Port Neches for the last month. Trust me that I recognize that maybe this is just me being entirely too dramatic about the whole situation. But also, the whole situation rocked my little world. So I’ll be dramatic about it if I want to. 

I am now very slowly reworking what the idea of home means to me. It has meant realizing that I need to put a little bit of an effort into a space to make it feel like my own. It has meant realizing that no place will feel the same as my childhood home, but also that it’s not supposed to. I’m no longer a child, and the family that grew up there no longer exists in the same sense. But, I don’t say that like it’s a bad thing. We’re all in a new era, one filled with new places and memories and bedrooms to decorate. 

Now, home is hanging out with the girls I grew up with. It’s the smell of my dad’s gumbo and the sound of my grandma’s laugh. Home is wherever my mom is blaring 80s music and I have to listen to my brother play video games. And I like that my new idea of home isn’t attached to a physical place. I can take it with me wherever I go. And ladies and gentleman, I would call that some major growth on my end.