How do you know where home is?

What is home?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question, because for me, when I think back to my cottage in Serine and Artur’s yard, my one bedroom, size-of-my-current-livingroom, house felt like home, like my safe place, like a place I could go where I knew everything was going to be ok, at least for the night, and for a long time.

I lived there for two years, and when I remember it, I remember it with a feeling that wells up in me, so much the same as the feeling that comes up for me when I think about the house I grew up in or the house I live in now.

What is it that makes home ‘home’? I’m not sure. I’m working on that. But I can tell you how home feels.

When you sense something - a sight, a texture, a smell, a sound - and you fill up with warmth, security and joy, that’s home.

For me, I can tell I’m home at my parents house when I turn on to their small-town-Texas street, and the car bounces in and out of the dip in the road’s water culvert before I even see the house. I can smell home when I walk in, something like clean laundry and candles, the air cool in my nose and throat. I can feel it when I run my fingers over the orange peel texture of the tan walls or over the back of my dad’s maroon, pleather chair. When you live in a place and love it, those things you sense over and over and over again trigger feelings of happiness or security or love or joy or hope.

I remember many of these things about my home in Armenia. I remember the sound of the gas coming on and the whoomp of air when I lit that gas with a match. I remember the cold tile floor and the slap of my plastic-soled slippers against it in the winter, the way I could pivot and slide over the tile while wearing them.

Before I moved in, Serine had laid a wheat-green woven runner over the backs of each of my green armchairs, the arms of which always gave way a little whenever I adjusted myself in the seat during a movie. The pink paint on the walls was powdery and matte, and I was always afraid to clean the walls because I didn’t want to rub off the paint.

On some mornings I would stay home to clean during the hours the water turned on. I’d leave the faucet open, and the pipes would gurgle as water, finally released to us, would make it’s way through the pipes and into my sink. That far away sound is something I can still hear approaching, signaling a morning of wiping away whatever I didn’t want to keep with me.

I did eventually return to Armenia seven years after I left it, and I wasn’t sure how I would feel when I went to visit Serine and Artur’s home. I mean, certainly I knew I would be so happy to see them. But I wasn’t sure if I would feel any sense of homecoming for a place I’d lived in for only two years, compared to my childhood home where I lived for twelve.

And then, on the night I went to have dinner with them on the porch, I walked there from the main road. I wasn’t sure I knew where to turn, and then I saw an orange box - a gas meter outside a small shop on the main road -, and my body told me to turn.

Then I kept going until I passed the church on my left. I walked another block and turned right. Had you asked me in that moment, I would have told you I still didn’t know how to get back to their house. But just when I thought I might be lost, I seemed to know the next turn, and again and again until there I was knocking on the door. Though I couldn’t draw you a map even now, in that moment, seven years after the last night I spent in my cottage, I could still find my way, unable to tell you where to go but following my own feet right to the front door, turn by turn.

That’s how I know it was a home for me then - because my body wanted to go back even though my mind couldn’t have placed it on a map.

My cottage in Stepanavan, my home away from home