What makes home home?

As a kid with divorced parents, I have always had more than one home. I have always had two different beds, two dinner tables, and two different places to eat my bedtime snack. As I got older and began moving around, I have always wondered what really makes home your home. And can you only have one true home? The answer, I think, is no.

I was born and raised in Fort McMurray, AB and my step-mom and dad still live in the house that we moved into when I was in grade 3. Whenever I go for a visit, I feel like I am going home. And I never get tired of the feeling when I roll into Fort Mac and come down the Beacon Hill road, and see the whole city from the top of that hill. I absolutely love the view.

Then I moved with my mother, and after two relatively quick moves, we settled into Drumheller. I graduated here and made many new friends upon entering into high school. This too, I call home. When I go visit my step-dad and mom from university, I am going home.

Then there's university, a place I felt very uncomfortable calling home when I first started school there. I would always say I was just "going back to Lethbridge." But as I got more and more settled, and well into school, I started to feel like Lethbridge was really becoming a part of me, growing on me with each and every day. My friends were there, school, and work, all made it start to feel like I had started and sustained my own life there. I moved around many times, too, in university, but always only needed a few days to adjust to the minor change before I was back into the groove and the rountine of living in Lethbridge.

Now, I am in New Zealand, and although it often amazes me that I am this far from 'home,' I can honestly say that this is now starting to feel like home. I love my house, the thought of coming home to it and after a long day at school and twenty nine 7 and 8 year olds demanding all of me at once, puts a little grin on my face. I feel comfortable here, I feel settled, I feel safe, I feel busy, I feel occupied, I feel content. I feel like the next 4 months will be the fastest 4 months of my life. And in a way, it is too bad because I know now already, just how quickly it will go.

It is funny to think of home and speak of it to other people, as if it is so far away; of the snow, the cold, country music, baseball, football, provincial achievement tests, 'garbage cans,' 'sidewalks,' 'renting,' and an ozone layer.. Yet, I feel like it is so close to me at the same time, so embedded within me and my thoughts and my values and my beliefs, that it really is not that far away. It does not feel 16,000 km away, but merely a delayed phone call or 'yesterday's' e-mail away.

So what makes a home? Is it the people who surround you? The luxury of having your own space or sharing it with 6 other people? Is it that the place is just great and everything just seems to be going your way? Or is it what you make of it, always trying to see the best in everything that happens?

All I know, is that home is where the heart is, and home is where my car is.

I am really not that far away because although I may be gone from home, home is nowhere nearly gone from me.