What Feels Like Home

Once we lived on the top floor of a house in San Francisco where I could see the ocean from my bed. With the windows open, I could hear it at night. It was deeply soothing, and it was very much what I needed at that time in my life. We had moved across the country with Z, and six months later we'd bring E home with us, to a life full of medical appointments and hospital stays, which wouldn't end until shortly before we moved away two years later.

It was the perfect place for us. It was full of light, and the floor plan allowed us to be near to one another no matter what room we were in, which helped us immensely in attending to the needs of both of our children. I knew walking in to view it the first time that I loved the light, and I loved the ocean view, and I could see our family living there. It was in my favorite neighborhood in San Francisco, which at the time was considered utterly uncool.

Mostly, though, the house just seemed like home. That's what I felt, more than anything, when I first walked up the stairs and into the sunlit rooms. Home. I am easily creeped out, and yet I never felt scared in that house; it reminded me an awful lot of the apartment I'd lived in when I was in Kansas City, which gifted me six and a half years of comfort as a single woman living alone. It was really nothing like the Kansas City place aside from that feeling. It felt right to me, like I belonged there, that was all.

Similarly, the house we find ourselves in now is nothing like my old place in Kansas City or the one in San Francisco. But it has that same feeling. It feels good to me, like home. And this makes me utterly delighted to be living here. The first house we were in here was a good house, but it didn't feel good to me the way this one does.

I am hoping that for the long term we will have a place of our own, a place that will feel like home that we won't have to leave after a few years. But for now, this place is good. I am grateful, every time I walk through our front door into the that feeling of belonging here, of home.