Art by Peau Porotesano
During my travels over Christmas break, I was faced with a rather vexing problem: the Airbnb I was staying at while exploring Rome was the definition of terrible. My previous experiences with the private property-renting website were great, but this house had a distinct lack of heat, a constant threat of burglars, a horrendous shower that flooded the entire first floor and a location that was a good hour (by unreliable bus) away from the city’s center. Needless to say, this lodging situation was not ideal. Why then, after a day of exploring the city, did I find myself saying, “Alright, let’s go home?”
This Airbnb could not be defined as “home” by the furthest stretch of the imagination. Referring to it as such seemed almost sacrilegious. This casual comment, perhaps a slip of the tongue, got me thinking about when I use the word “home” and what it actually means to me. Does it detract from the worth of the word to associate it with places that obviously do not fit the connotation?
The first time I ever used the word “home” to refer to anything but my childhood house caught me by surprise. It was about two weeks into freshman year, and I was out and about with my suitemates. I said something along the lines of, “Let’s go home,” and despite us all being from different cities and different states, and having only known each other for two weeks, we all knew what that meant.
Of course, the dorm was not really our home — at least not yet. If you asked each of us for a home address, we probably would have referred back to our “real” houses in our respective states. It was only somewhere we were staying for a brief period of time. However, while it certainly wasn’t home, it felt like it. It was a base, something to come back to. A place that was quickly becoming more familiar. And, perhaps most importantly, it was a place filled with people who were quickly becoming more like family.
I’ve found that this phenomenon recurs each time I stay in a new place throughout my adventures abroad. While my childhood home will always hold a very special place in my heart (Home with a capital H, if you will), the word “home” slips easily into my daily dialogue when discussing anything from the London House (my current place of residence) to the various places I’ve stayed during my travels. It becomes synonymous with “home base,” a shared starting and ending point for all adventures, big and small.
Sometimes it startles me how easy it is for me to casually refer to a place as “home.” At first, I did think that I needed to be more intentional with how I used the word. I did a mental check on each place that I referred to as home. Did my freshman dorm become my home? Yes. Is the London House my home now? Yes. After traveling through Europe for a month, walking through the big wooden door into the familiar reception room certainly felt like coming home. But I also use “home” when talking about hotels, hostels and even that particularly hellish Airbnb. The sentence is always the same: “Let’s go home.”
What I’ve decided is that for me, the word “home” brings a certain kind of warmth, even to places that are far from feeling “homey.” Through my travels, I’ve had to question and redefine what home means to me. Here is the best definition I’ve come up with, at the risk of being too sappy.
Home is the warmth of nostalgia and a constant recollection of beginnings; it’s a level of comfort. Home is, most significantly, the feeling you get when you are around people you know and love. It’s something you carry with you, and something that I admittedly tend to superimpose on physical structures.
The next time I feel tempted to say “Let’s go home,” I’m not going to stop myself. I know now that I’m not devaluing the word or the feeling I get when I am at Home, with a capital H. While I’m traveling — staying at the places in between — I know that the word “home” does not refer to the buildings or structures at all. What I mean is a place I can go to take some solace in something familiar (the company of familiar people I care about) after a long day of experiencing the rest of the world.
_________________
Follow Cassandra Stephenson on Twitter: @CassieKay27
