Katherine’s Mind

I’m grateful to have so many places that feel like home.

After living my entire life in the same neighborhood—5 minutes from my school and 20 minutes from my church—I was both excited to leave home and terrified that I wouldn’t be “known” in the same way that I had been in Dallas (and thus, per my first blog post, I wouldn’t be “loved” either). I’m someone who craves both stability and adventure, and I had a hard time reconciling the seemingly mutually exclusive nature of the two. Over the past year, I’ve discovered how to embrace the adventures and create little pockets of “home” wherever I am because, while it’s beautiful to have a “home base,” I’m learning that it’s also beautiful to leave little pieces of your heart behind in special places.

There’s a wooden cabin in Colorado whose porch watched me spit cherry pits off the balcony, nap under a plaid and scratchy blanket, and marvel at the Lord’s power, creativity, and lovingkindness.

There’s a little house in Savannah, Georgia with a swinging chair in the backyard which listened to hushed giggles at bedtime after my dear friends and I spent an evening of marathoning Twilight.

There’s an apartment in Greece with yellow walls which watched me and my roommate repack her suitcase full of souvenirs for other people and a balcony which heard all my long-distance phone calls.

There’s a dorm room in Evanston with a garland of post-it-note hearts and a prime people-watching view where I facetimed my high school friends after a great first date and where I cried on the floor after a particularly difficult religious history class.

A block away, there’s a green house with string lights in the attic and an “open door policy” where I clumsily translated Cicero after large group and (even more clumsily) tried to make enough Korean potato pancakes for 40 people.

There’s a red brick house with a blue front door in Dallas that has witnessed my mother faithfully prepare breakfast for three young children, my father immerse himself the Word in the study window at dawn, my brothers transition from wrestling each other to playing video games before eventually moving away, and my attempts to sing audition songs, understand calculus, and comfort hurting friends.

While the durations of time I’ve spent at each of these homes varies dramatically, I’m discovering that it’s not the hours spent which qualify one as a “home,” but rather the memories formed there and their impact on how I perceive myself, the world, and my place in it.

I think my eighteen-year-old self would feel relieved to hear that the feeling of “homesickness” doesn’t plague her the way she thought it would. In every location, there are conversations which have brought about deep community and overflowing love. At the end of the day, it’s cheesy, but it truly is the people who shared those memories and places with me that have made each one rise to the level of “home.”

I am at peace knowing so many pockets of the world feel like home, I have been known and loved in each of them, and there are many, many more homes still left to live in.