Home -- E.

Where is home?

Our family moves around a lot, which makes the answer to this question tricky at times.  When we lived in North Carolina last year, and we made the occasional trip back to Delaware, I sometimes told the children we were going back "home" for a visit.  This confused James: "Isn't North Carolina our home now?"

One year ago, our home was in Malaysia.  But for a brief time, we were renting two different houses at the same time, which complicated things; and at any rate Queena and I still thought of the United States as home in a significant sense.

Some say children who grow up in an international setting develop a lifelong difficulty identifying a real home for themselves.

Some like to point out that "this world is not my home", and perhaps those who live without attachment to any particular earthly domicile have a head start on heaven.

But I'm getting deeper into all this than I meant to.  Because, do you know how my family knows where home is?  It's simply where the bedsheet is hanging up.  Take a look inside seven of the last thirteen houses where we have lived:

See the bedsheet?  It has hung in every house that we have called home since 2007.  It's how we know where home is.

For the past two months we have been living in other people's homes.  And I'm grateful, more than I can say, that we've had these places to stay over this time.  Our parents and siblings are wonderful people.  But on the other hand, we have not had the bedsheet up, not since early November.  And the four of us miss seeing it.  We miss the sense of being home.  Next week, we move back to Delaware, and the bedsheet is going on the wall again.

I am so ready.