by Ruth Woodhouse

Created on: May 06, 2008

To me home is the place where I am most free to be myself. It is the place where I have the greatest sense of belonging and where I can relate most intimately to the people who mean the most to me. It's also the place where I am surrounded by my own special belongings, with which I am familiar, and which are personally meaningful to me. It is the place where I have around me so many things that represent me as an individual - and things I treasure, which hold countless memories of my own history - including innumerable people who have been part of it.

As one of our fridge magnets says, "Home is where you hang your memories". Some of them are hanging on walls, while others "hang" all sorts of places. In our house, one truly never knows where they will find what reminders of bygone years and experiences "hanging around". It might be compared to one of those "search and find" picture books that are so popular with kids these days.

Home can mean so many different things to different people - and there would be a wide variety of definitions. I can remember somebody who led an itinerant lifestyle once telling me she had come to the conclusion that home was wherever she put her things down for a while. This was undoubtedly not the ultimate definition of home for her - or what she would have preferred to be her norm. However, as with so many people, she'd had to adjust her definition of home to fit in with her circumstances. This allowed her to cope and to even find contentment in her lifestyle that had its challenges.

There is, of course, an old saying that home is where the heart is. In that respect it can indeed be anywhere you are for a longer or shorter period of time, so long as you feel a sense of belonging there, and your heart is in that place at that point in your life's journey.

For many of us, there will always be at least two places we regard as home - the place where we are living now and the place where we grew up. I spent most of my formative years in the island state of Tasmania - where I lived with my mother in just two houses during the extensive part of my childhood I can recall.

Our first home that I remember was just a couple of rooms we rented in an old dilapidated "boarding house" that had once been an exclusive girls' school. I was only 3 or 4 when we went to live there. When we moved to our own housing department home I was 9. I didn't leave there till I was 24 and went to another state to do a college course.

Even then it was still home to me.

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