What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?
I sit at the dining room table in this house that isn’t mine, and watch a woman walk by with two greyhounds, and a tree, foaming with pink blossom, swaying in the April wind, and I think about home.
(Where is it?)
Home, they say, is where the heart is.
(Where is it?)
I have left my heart all over the place.
Careless, but better than the alternative.
(Pack it up, put it in a cardboard box and take it to the next house. Remember to take it out again. Otherwise, in ten years I might find it in a still-sealed box, labelled in marker pen: Kathleen’s heart & other last-minute things from Guildford. This has happened before.)
Actually, I think it may have gone on ahead of me.
Wait for me, heart. Wait for me, home.
I know a man who has designed a board game that follows the twisting twining journey through life and based on your responses to various dilemmas will work out what home means for you. It gives a different answer every time. I played it once. We laughed a lot, though I’m still not sure about home.
An Englishwoman’s home is her castle. I must get someone to see to the drawbridge.
I remember when home was huge and full of secrets, standing on the lowest rung of the fence, or kneeling up on the just-made spare bed, watching the road as far as the bend in the corner beyond which was not home, waiting for the next guest. Home was never so much home as when someone was staying.
Home is the place where the people come.
Home is the place where the parties are.
Home is the place where you can find a place where no one will disturb you, unless you want them to.
Kathleen Jowitt 