My big kid life: Continuing the life of an adventurous "student": "HOME"

Cheers to 2 years in Alaska

"Are you on your home?" said the man sitting next to me on a flight from Salt Lake to Denver. I looked at him and kind of laughed. "I guess so" I responded. At one time I did call Denver 'home', after I moved there from my hometown of Salt Lake. I called it home the day after I moved into my Jmac dorm with Rachel freshman year of college. I considered Denver home for 4 years. But intermittently during those 4 years I also called Cooperstown, New York home for 3 months. The wooden bunk beds, bathhouse shower, styrofoam plates were all what would be my home. And then I called 7 oriente and 7 oriente home in Vina del Mar, Chile for 5 months. My little room off the kitchen with a Mickey Mouse bedspread was my home. Mama and Papa treated me like one of their own bringing me along on family trips and celebrating every Sunday with a 4 hour meal. Then I called pension Nazionale home for 4 months in Florence eating with our pension family for 3 meals a day.

Nazionale family. Florence, Italy

Chilean host family

Homer, Alaska

Now for the past 2 years I've called Alaska 'home.' The dark winter nights, the summer days filled with fishing, hiking and camping, the canoe outings in October and the 9:30pm golf nights in May. It really is home. I feel comfortable here. More than comfortable I feel challenged. It didn't always feel like home when I first went south on the highway when I lived north. It didn't feel like home when I would google the nearest grocery store. Sometimes I still feel like I'm living in a movie here when I'm camping with strangers who are all talking about the biggest animals they've ever hunted but it's home and these people are part of it and I like it.

Words can mean a lot of different things to different people and I'd like to think that I can choose what 'home' means to me. The dictionary defines home: a place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household. I think you can call many places home. I've called my tent home when it's the only shelter I've got for miles. There's that cliche phrase "home is where the heart is" and I've never really bought that. My heart is with so many people and places all over the world that I've never even been to and wouldn't consider home. Home to me is wherever you want it to be. Whatever couch, tent, bed you want. There's that idea of 'home field'/'home team' that athletes feel. Growing up the ice rink was like a home and any piece of ice to this today brings a feeling of comfort that I'd get from home.

Friends from growing up still ask "when are you coming home?" and honestly I spend more days throughout the year in Seattle than I do in the place I grew up, but to them it'll always be home. It currently isn't really my home but yet my parents still live in the house I grew up in so in a way it'll always be home.

Another question I laugh at, "where are you from?" Well I live in Anchorage, but I wasn't born there but the friends that I'm currently with are from all over the country but we know each other because we lived together in Denver. We were all physically born someplace, but each place we've lived/been/experienced has contributed who we currently are. So answer that question however you want because really we come from a lot of different places. We're complex people from a combination of backgrounds and experiences.

So "yes" I'm going home. Home to Denver, or home to Salt Lake or home to Alaska; it's all home. It's all given me warmth and peace and love and contributed to who I am! Don't get hung up on the details, it's okay to call multiple places home.