What is home?

Note: This blog post is best paired with "Everybody's Changing" by Keane and "Ribs" by Lorde

I'm sitting on the front porch of my childhood home, surrounded by the sounds of trees being tousled by a gentle summer breeze and the hum of cars passing by in the distance. The buzz of cicadas is like a lullaby, constant and comforting. Through the door and down the hall is my bedroom, and though it's left exactly as it was, aside from a few posters that have fallen, it doesn't feel like mine. This town, the place I was born and raised, is so familiar, yet I fear it doesn't know me anymore, and I wonder if I still know it.

Something I have loved to hate about small towns is that everyone knows everyone. In some people's experience, that means the very worst thing you ever did was the very thing you were forever defined by, no matter how much time passed by. You couldn't grab your morning coffee from the gas station without someone elbowing their pal to whisper about you. But, on the other side of that same coin is the beauty of being known by everyone.

When something tragic happens in a small town, the whole community bands together and falls in sync as if made of the very same heartbeat. I've seen this phenomenon a couple of times in my life -- during the May Flood of 2010 and during my brother's sudden death. For all the gossip and hypocrisy that may exist (though this isn't exclusive to a small town, mind you), there's an even greater measure of sweetness, and I don't just mean the amount of sugar they put in their iced tea.

But today, as I walked in and out of the shops on the town square, I didn't get the gossip or the sweetness. I didn't go unnoticed, but I wasn't truly seen, either. I saw people I knew, or knew of, but we smiled half-heartedly like you would at a perfect stranger. I thought it odd that I felt so sad about it because I spent so much of my life craving the crowds and the ability to move through them completely unnoticed; I expected and yearned for that treatment in a big city, but I didn't expect it from a small town. I didn't think a red carpet would be rolled out for my homecoming, but a part of me hoped I'd run into someone I could catch up with, someone to ask how life had been since we graduated high school, someone who would make me feel like I wasn't a stranger in my own hometown.

Earlier, I was chatting with the cashier at a local shop, and she was surprised that she didn't know me.

"I know everyone," she said proudly, "but I don't know you..."

She asked for my full name, and I gave it, or at least the one I went by before I got married, the name everyone here would have known me by.

"Nope. Never heard that one, never heard of ya."

She might not know me, but I know this town. This is where I spent my youth and popsicle-filled summers, climbing trees and getting covered in poison ivy rashes and mosquito bites. These are the roads I learned to drive on, the ones that took me back and forth from my place to my best friend's house. That's the football field I spent nearly every Thursday and Friday night cheerleading from the sidelines. That used to be the public pool, the coolest place to be outside of the skating rink, at least that's what I always thought and why I always begged to go.

I move through this town with ease, but is this my home? Is this where I'm known? Is this where I'm celebrated and missed when I'm gone? This place feels like a museum of important moments in my life; what once was an everyday item of use sits as a relic in my childhood bedroom. In many ways, it's changed, but in others, it's exactly the same. This town could say the same thing for me. I'm no longer that 5 year old with ringlets and popsicle stains in the corners of my mouth. I know which plants to avoid so I don't get covered in rashes. My best friend doesn't live in that house anymore. I haven't cheered since 2017, and I couldn't tell you the last time I went to a football game at that field. The pool has been filled in and turned into a playground. The skating rink closed down. So, maybe it's not the same town I once knew, and I am not the same girl as before, but it's still the place where I grew up, the place I called home for most of my life.

When you consult the dictionary, it defines home as "the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household." But I've known a lot of homes despite only ever being permanently based in two places.

Home is the place you feel invited and encouraged to kick off your shoes and help yourself to whatever is in the fridge.

Home is the place you can unwind after a long day, the place where it feels safe to let your guard down.

Home is the place that makes you feel like your best self but holds you gently even when you aren't.

Home can be a person or a place. Home can be the hotel you've unpacked your bags in, even though you're packing up and leaving in 5 days. Home can be the best friend who dances with you recklessly in the kitchen. Home is the man who willingly vowed to love you for the rest of his life.

And home is still that small town — both the version I knew and the version I experience now. And maybe, as I continue to settle down in London, my childhood home grows more and more unfamiliar with me just as I am with it, but it still welcomes me back again and again. And somehow, after all the time I’ve spent away from it, I settle back in with ease like I never left. So, no, maybe this town doesn’t know this version of me very well and maybe I don’t know this version of it, but it’s still a place I call home, and I’m still the little girl that grew up in it.

So, I sit on this porch and soak in the sounds that haven't changed one bit since I moved out -- the sounds of trees being tousled by a gentle summer breeze and the hum of cars passing by in the distance. The buzz of cicadas is like a lullaby, constant and comforting.

I am home.

My little slice of Tennessee in London.