Home

So much of literature turns on the question: What and where is home?  So many travelers spend years trying to "get back home." Frost writes in "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home is where/when you have to go there/ they have to take you in."

The film, Brooklyn, is all about the experience of one Irish immigrant to the United States, 1952.  It's haunting to follow her into a strange world (America), then follow her back to Ireland--where the question that propels her is Which place do I choose as home?

Yesterday's episode of Fresh Air was an interview with Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America.  I haven't read it yet, but will.  The entire book is written in the form of  hotel reviews.

Terry Gross asked Moody to read the section of the book that has to do with home:

Home is the place your enemies would wish to avoid.

Home is the place your former lovers are troubled by.

Home is where you can sit at the quiet table in the morning.

Home is the place you sometimes hate but you also love the second you leave it.

Home is any address that causes you to tear up.

Home is near the metal box that has your surname on it, where nearly every postcard you have ever received has been delivered.

Home is where the government of your nation believes you live.

Home is where your mother or father brought you the second you no longer lived in the hospital.

Home is where you first sang whatever it is you first sang.

What "welcome" means you first learned there, as well as "home."

Home is where your bedroom was and is now.

Home is where you sleep more days than you sleep anywhere else because if it were otherwise, you'd renegotiate the application of the word, home. 

Home is what you will describe in your masterpiece, either home or the leaving of home.

If you say you have no home on earth, then what you mean is that there was trouble at your home.

Home is where you go right before dark.

Home is where you go when you are recovered; 

When work becomes impossible, you will long for home.

It is possible that in your life you have had multiple homes, a sequence of homes, and that each of these has required a transition.  For example, when you were in a car that carried you to a home where both your parents had lived together to a house where only one of your parents lived even during that car ride there was still an idea of home.