:: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 ::

I was going to respond to some comments on my last post, and then I thought I'd just make a whole new post out of it.

Some people responded to my thoughts about the word "home" by saying what they considered it to mean... where your family is, different feelings of self, etc. I always love when my posts actually inspire commments!

So these comments got me to thinking... while I do get the concept of "home is where the heart is"... and I do feel, in some sense, "at home" in the company and living spaces of my good friends and family... I just don't get that same sensation of home from those things as I do from a physical space... from that particular smell and the furniture arranged just so and the old books and the rag rugs and the special mugs and all that jazz. But it's weird, because it's something more than that... because you can pick all that stuff up and move it, and yet the feeling doesn't just come with... no, the feeling has to be cultivated. You have to plant all those things into a space, and then tend it all year, dirtying it and then cleaning it, hanging out, studying, visiting, phone talking, internetwhoring, latenightcookiemaking, bad movie watching, etc etc etc, until all of a sudden it's a year and a bit later and you realize that you have a bumper-crop of "home" to harvest.

mmm. tasty, tasty home.

and the best part about this is, of course, that it regenerates. you pick up the things that you love, be they inanimate things like mugs and books, or sentient things like husbands and babies, and you plug them all into some random space and what do you know? it grows just as well there as anywhere else. and when you leave a place, that feeling can linger. maybe not if you sell it to some people who reno it and start cultivating their home-feeling, but say, if your parents remain and all your stuff is gone but the new stuff is their stuff and all the walls still have that memory of it being your home and the smell is still the same... though the smell of your parents' home is never quite the same as the smell of your own, but it's still just as "homey" only in a different way...

(although, to be honest, my apartment never seems to smell very good anymore. not sure what's causing that. stupid landlord-not-letting-me-burn-insense-the-cure-all-for-scary-house-smells).

(sorry for the complete degeneration of grammar and punctuation and whatnot. sometimes i just can't be bothered.)


~song~ Kia Kadiri - True Soul

:: Katy 11:52 p.m. [+] :: ::