HOME IS A ROOM I’ve prepared in my heart to store my most prized memories. There, I recall the beautiful orange chiffon-and-velvet dress Mrs. Porter, a family friend, gave me when I was 5 years old. It holds the joyous feeling I experienced when I held my sons for the first time.
It preserves the moment when my mother, who didn’t have the educational opportunities I had, said my college graduation was an “auspicious” occasion and I had to look up the word. Home is where I’m humbled and celebrated.
What I like about my tiny home is its mobility. It also has a unique ability to expand as needed to store new joys, take in new friendships, and offer peace and calm on days that are a series of unexpected events.
Why We Wrote This
What does home mean to you? The response to our call for vignettes about home was robust. This resulting collection is a tribute to love, comfort, and belonging. We hope these stories kindle the warmth of home in your heart.
I go home as often as I can because it brings me back to my true north.
– Maisie Sparks is the author of “Holy Shakespeare!” and other works.
Wartime
“HOME” IS NOT a word I would have applied to the aged house, with its peeling layers of blue paint and with multiple signs of the war that ravaged the front-line hamlet of Prudyanka, north of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
This is where Ukrainian forces drew the line on the Russian advance in May 2022, halting it for half a year at a high cost of destruction to houses and lives. Without running water or electricity, and with many houses damaged beyond immediate repair, most residents had fled the ruins.
But not Tetyana Tokar, an octogenarian with a scrap-of-cloth headscarf. I found her receiving hot soup and fresh bread from the relief agency World Central Kitchen, as it made a food drop-off.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
Ms. Tokar pointed to the rifle of my Ukrainian military escort and joked, “You should point it here,” motioning toward her head with a laugh, as if her decision to stay in the wrecked hamlet was crazy.
Winter was looming with frigid conditions, and Russia had been targeting electrical substations to keep Ukrainians cold.
Behind the house, Ms. Tokar’s 95-year-old aunt, Ksenia Yehorova, tended a fire to heat soup in a blackened pot and hacked pieces of wood from a rain-soaked woodpile.
I was impressed by their fortitude. Wrapped in multiple layers to ward off the cold, these women chose the manifest hardships of home over the uncertainties of someplace else.
“It’s very cold; we live like we are on the street,” Ms. Tokar said. “But my aunt doesn’t want to go.”
– Scott Peterson is the Monitor’s senior Middle East correspondent.
WE STARED AT THE STAIRS, not recognizing what they would mean to us for the rest of our lives. Rising from rubble through pockmarked concrete walls, they were glittery and crunchy with broken glass. We were reporting in Grozny, Chechnya, during a cease-fire in the brutal war between Russia and breakaway rebels in the summer of 1996. We’d been offered ostensibly safe quarters in a 10th-floor apartment of a bombed-out high-rise.
It was the first and only time my husband and I went on a reporting assignment together.
We’d had long days of physically tiring and emotionally difficult interviews – with rebel leaders, edgy Russian soldiers, and dazed Chechen civilians, one of whom offered up the apartment his family had abandoned.
It was a furnished room with a view and without water or electricity. Before heading upstairs, we each were handed a bucket of water – a humble offering of hospitality for drinking, washing, and aiding the toilet with gravity.
It’s hard to explain how the sad dust of war in that little apartment created the mortar for our sense of home.
We finally lay down to rest on a mattress on the floor, under a picture window with only a mean-looking 5-foot shard of glass intact. We watched the stars between bright-red rocket flares over the shell-shocked landscape.
But it was strangely comfortable.
We were us. Together, and unforgettably home.
– Clara Germani is a senior editor at the Monitor.
Family
IT’S AUGUST 2021, and we are on summer vacation in Fremont, California, known to us as Little Kabul, the largest Afghan community in the United States. My grandma Bibijan and I are sitting on an overstuffed couch looking at sepia-toned photos sprawled on the coffee table. With each image, I unlock a memory from the foggy corners of her 80-something-year-old brain.
In one picture, three women stand stiffly in the middle of an orchard. Bibijan smiles and recalls a stream and pomegranates, plucked fresh from the orchard. I listen intently – this is the closest I get to visiting what should have been my homeland.
My identity is scattered in pieces. Conceived amid the bombs in Kabul, I was born and raised until age 7 in Fremont, and taught that my mother tongue, Farsi, was a foreign language.
Then we moved to Istanbul, where I’m treated like a foreigner even though I have lived here so long. If I ever go to Afghanistan, they’ll see me as different, even though I look like them: brown and bold.
I am a bit of a cultural nomad, drifting across continents. Everywhere I go, I don’t belong.
But I feel at home every Saturday when I call Bibijan from Istanbul, and she can never get the camera to work on her iPad, and she repeats conversations because she forgets, and I hear the rhythms of her broken English. During these calls, it’s bearable that I don’t feel rooted in a place, because Bibijan’s love seems to reach across oceans and wrap around me like a hug. That’s how home should feel.
– Bonoo Azizian, an Afghan American writer living in Istanbul, is a sophomore in high school.
“OVER THE RIVER and through the wood, / To [grandmother’s] house we go.” That’s how a lot of kids, myself included, learned Lydia Maria Child’s 1844 Thanksgiving poem. It actually says “grandfather’s house,” but the popularized version made perfect sense to me since we literally drove over a river and through woods to get to my grandmothers, who lived about 30 minutes from each other.
Their houses were mirror images of each other. Whether I was at my maternal or paternal grandmother’s house, it was home. Everyone entered both places through the side door, because that brought you to the heart of the house. If the smells of the kitchen didn’t get your attention, the excitement from the living room would.
Their Southern drawls were different in tone but held the same warmth when they wailed, “Helloooooo!” It was a clarion call to love, to service.
To home.
I experienced that sense of security wherever they were. It could be in the reliable Ford my dad’s mom drove, where she let me pop in gospel cassette tapes, or in the grocery store my mom’s mom frequented. She was a strong woman with one weakness – the soft eyes of tiny, demanding grandchildren.
Grandmothers are guardian angels who disappear in a flash, leaving light and legacy. Without mine, it’s been hard to find my way back home. As it turned out, though, I didn’t have to go far.
My father’s house feels the most like home now. My children are on the floor, saturating the living room with toys, drawings, and juice. I look into their eyes and see both the past and the present. I am 40, yet I find myself getting lost in Dad’s brown corduroy couch as if I am 4. I’ve found what I was looking for.
– Ken Makin, who lives in South Carolina, is a contributing writer to the Monitor and host of the “Makin’ A Difference” podcast.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, home was my grandmother’s house – white-washed, solid brick. What a gift to grow up with the security of a base to return to. How unknowingly lucky I was to have a roof over my head, everything I needed, nothing and no one left behind because of war, poverty, or disaster.
As an adult, I lived in various houses, apartments, and condos – all safe shelters.
Then I married and moved into my husband’s house, a ramshackle 1920s cottage he jokingly called a “hovel.” He told me we would renovate it together. Turned out, it was so ramshackle that we started over. Now I live in a house he designed just for us, with huge windows overlooking the tidal river it borders, wide windowsills for our kitties to lounge on, bookcases filled with his “friends” and my photos from distant lands.
But it’s not the walls and roof, the kitchen or bedrooms that make a house a home – it’s the people inside.
I have been invited into people’s homes all over the world – from an Afghan mud hut built into the ruins of a bombed-out building where the family was sharing an iftar meal during Ramadan, to a shack in Madagascar where the family had only one spoon and one bowl to share. I’m humbled each time a stranger opens their home to me. And I treasure the connection that happens between us in the intimacy of their private space.
I love to travel, but coming back to my husband is the best part. He is my home.
– Melanie Stetson Freeman is a staff photographer at the Monitor.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
I DIDN’T KNOW how much I loved home until, at age 7, I went to an eight-week summer camp, nine hours away. Thinking about my mother, at home without me, sent me into paroxysms of tears – big, rolling sobs that welled up from someplace deep and uncharted. At night, I filled my Snoopy stationery with weepy pleas to bring me home.
Eight summers later, believing myself to be a self-possessed 15-year-old, I went on a cross-country teen tour. The first night, I learned that those homesickness spasms had burrowed deep into my muscle memory. The simplest discomfort of the trip would bring up convulsive, irrepressible tears. At age 15! The other kids gaped. My love for home had become a wrenching source of shame.
When I had my own children, I almost didn’t send them to camp so as to spare them this anguish. My heart cramped when the first tearful letter arrived from our 10-year-old son, scrawled by flashlight on his Minions stationery. But by then I understood that homesickness isn’t humiliation; it’s the low, low price of knowing deeply that you’re loved.
Homesickness is evidence of a love so primal it squeezes your heart and shreds your vanity. But that belonging is also the sensation we spend the rest of our lives chasing. “Home is heaven for beginners,” said late 19th-century American clergyman Charles Henry Parkhurst. Those of us lucky enough to have been homesick – or to have had kids who were – have snagged an early taste of heaven.
– Kinney Zalesne, a former Microsoft executive, is a strategy consultant in Washington, D.C.
Friends
HER EYES TWINKLE. “Shhhhh.” My childhood chum, now a high school junior, presses her forefinger against pursed lips. “Let’s have some fun.”
She balls her fist and bangs on a cupboard. “How do you open these?” She pounds once more, and this time the door swings open.
“Spring-loaded, eh?” She hops down from the counter and opens cupboard doors one by one, picking up speed as she goes.
“Let’s see what we got in here.” She pulls down jars and frowns. “Who eats this much spaghetti?” She crackles bags of pasta and giggles. “Plus, how come you didn’t know how to open these cupboards? This is your house, isn’t it?”
Indeed. But it is new to me and not yet a home. My parents moved us while I was away at camp. I’ve been here a week. I can’t recite my address.
My friend snaps me back to the present. “Ahhhh … bingo.” She caresses a sleeve of chocolate-covered graham crackers and throws open the fridge. “Gotta have milk.”
She pops back up to her counter perch and sits – drink in one hand, sweets in the other. “You do the honors.” She thrusts the treats at me, but opens the milk and takes a swig.
Shouldn’t I get her a glass? She reads my mind and clamps my hand on the carton. “C’mon, christen your new house – time to make it your home.”
Throw caution to the wind, I say to myself. What’s a home without memories? I grab the drink and chug away. My pal laughs, her cheeks bulging. She snatches two more yummies from the plastic wrapper and jams them into her mouth.
“First one to the bottom wins.”
She beats me there, but I take the final prize – this house is now a home.
– Gloria Goodale is a former Monitor reporter who covered culture and politics from 1985 to 2016.
I WAS 11 YEARS OLD when I met Asya, and she seemed impossibly cool to me. She spoke fluent Russian, wrote poems, and wore sky-blue eye shadow. I was intense, shy, and gangly. We were sixth graders at a school for the arts, in the creative writing program, and somehow, we became best friends.
For the past decade, I have seen Asya at most once a year. She lives in the United States; I live in South Africa. But we speak nearly every day on WhatsApp, an endlessly unspooling thread of dog photos, bad-date stories, and “Queer Eye” memes. I wake up to selfies from her grandmother’s birthday. She gets a flurry of photos of the 3-foot-tall mini cows I saw on vacation as she spends her afternoon writing law briefs.
So much of my life has been documented and witnessed in our chat that opening it feels instantly like coming home. If this WhatsApp thread were a house, it would be the kind you enter without knocking, where you have free rein to rummage through the fridge or curl up with a book in the living room.
Recently, Asya and I spent a week in Georgia (the country, not the state). We hiked to ancient monasteries, pinched together fat dumplings in a cooking class, and went thrifting in a market hidden under a train station. When we were 11, Asya was the coolest person I knew. Now we are 34, and, impossibly, she still is: a tremendously funny, wise, and adventurous woman (though with less blue eyeshadow).
When the week was up, we parted ways in the airport to board our separate flights. Ten hours later, I landed in Johannesburg and turned on my phone. There was a text from Asya, asking about my trip. At once, I was home.
– Ryan Lenora Brown is a journalist and former Monitor correspondent in South Africa.
LAST YEAR, MY HUSBAND AND I sold most of our furniture, rented a U-Haul, and packed up our baby and two cats to move in with our friend and his dog. He had just bought a place, and we wanted to save up to buy our own home. We were adults in our 30s and 40s – what could possibly go wrong?
We entered the condo in a swirl of chaos. We discussed whether a microwave was necessary; we chose who had the best blender. We debated how many pictures could go on the walls and who got which bedroom.
Slowly, we transitioned to our new normal. We’ve learned each other’s rhythms and preferences. Our quirks have revealed themselves. The pets have made peace with one another, and we’ve settled into an unconventional calm.
One day, as my roommate struggled to find space for his groceries, I scurried over to move our things. I muttered an apology and shared that sometimes I felt like we’d ruined his ambiance, encroaching on him like a bunch of weeds.
I don’t feel that way at all, he said. To me, you guys are more like wildflowers, blooming everywhere.
I’ve realized that creating a home has nothing to do with owning one. It’s choosing to navigate your space with kindness, embracing everyone there and allowing them to embrace you.
It’s choosing to do life together, and leaning into everything that comes with it. Even the chaos.
– Samantha Laine Perfas is a contributing writer to the Monitor living in Revere, Massachusetts.
DURING THE PANDEMIC, I started cutting my husband’s hair. I had never done it before. I just decided to pretend I knew how to do it and then see what happened. The stakes were pretty low; no one was seeing anyone.
As I worked my way around his head of thick brown hair, I felt like a kid pretending to be a grown-up. And lo and behold, it wasn’t awful! He looked good, and my confidence grew. I started cutting my kids’ hair, and then my neighbors’ kids’ hair, and pretty soon, I was the go-to hairdresser in our co-housing community.
It was a total surprise and delight, and also a relief. I’ve lived in this community in Oakland, California, for a decade now, and it’s sad to realize that I have almost no practical skills. Randy can fix an ancient dishwasher, and Louise doesn’t bat an eyelash when she notices blight on the big peach tree. She knows exactly how to save it. Deborah can paint a mural, Jimmy can balance the books, and Nathan can get on the ladder and clean out the gutters without getting nervous at all. When the bees built a nest in Cheryl’s attic, Tom not only knew what to do but also was ecstatic – a new mother for his bee box! He put on his beekeeping suit and coaxed those little sweeties over to his part of the yard.
Meanwhile, I was wandering around asking people which weeds to pull and wishing my penchant for poetry was more useful. At least I make fat babies, I reasoned; everyone seems uplifted by those. But now I can cut hair! And while everyone loved me when I couldn’t, it feels good to have grown up at last.
– Courtney E. Martin is the author of “Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School.”
Ann Heisenfelt/AP/File
Nature
I HAD MOVED TO A CITY, which was very different from my home in the mountains. There were always cars on the road, and everywhere was paved and lit so brightly that the stars were hidden.
Many of the trees were ornamental – flowering beasts with spliced genes that made fruit so hard and sour the waxwings couldn’t eat it. In May, landscapers dropped fully blossomed tulips into the ground and then dug them up two weeks later, replacing them with geraniums.
I walked off-kilter without the rhythm of the natural cycles I’d grown up with: foamflower blossoming and then pink lady’s-slipper, wild strawberries ripening and then blackcap raspberries.
To help pay for groceries, I took a job babysitting two girls. We’d walk to a nearby park and shoot baskets and ride the slides. During a windy game of kickball in September, a wayward bounce and gust sent the ball toward a stormwater ditch.
On my retrieval, I found that, mercifully, no one had taken a mower to the edge or a weed wacker down into the muddy bottom. This gracious neglect meant that jewelweed, a native medicinal plant I recognized from back home, had endured, and its orange trumpet flowers were blaring beside the pregnant seed pods.
I showed the girls how to pinch the “ripe” pods to make the seeds spring forward. Then we waded through the patch and squealed at the unfurling between our forefingers and thumbs. Again and again, this simple joy from my own childhood, which is itself a home, was reflected on the girls’ grinning faces as they searched for the plumpest pods – each tiny burst sending them into a backstroke of happiness as their laughing took flight like pileated woodpeckers, cackling and colorful, into the sky.
– Noah Davis, a poet living in Montana, is the author of “Of This River” and has a second collection of poems coming out in 2025.
IF YOU DEFINE feeling at home as a sense of well-being, sometimes I am most at home when furthest removed from it.
The distance can be geographical, as when I was in a deserted park in New Mexico, miles from anyone, finding planets, stars, and deep sky objects in a staggering night sky. Or I can feel far away right there in the house where I live – when I’m watching a praying mantis on the outside of my living room window or lying in bed on a warm summer night, listening to the whinnying of a screech owl.
I can feel at home with my work and, of course, my family, but the greater sense of being at home has always come from nature – large and small, near and far.
Nature takes me out of myself, makes me look in wonder at the world, and pulls me away from the boorish and strident clamor of humanity. It makes me feel at home.
Except for mosquitoes.
– John Sichel is a music professor and composer who lives in New Jersey.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
ON ASSIGNMENT in Taloyoak, Nunavut, in Arctic Canada, reporting a story about Inuit conservation efforts, I stayed in the home of a woman named Jeannie. It was June, the time of 24-hour sunlight, a time when light doesn’t dictate the patterns of work, meals, or sleep. Instead, the community maximizes being “out on the land.”
My first evening there, Jeannie had an event until 9 p.m. Afterward, she returned to the house, quickly showered, and then headed out on the land in an all-terrain vehicle to a simple camp two hours away to join her husband, grown children, and grandchildren for ice fishing. Watching her that first evening, I kept saying to myself, it’s 10 p.m. Why wouldn’t she sleep at home in her comfortable bed and then go out to her cabin first thing in the morning?
But the more I saw families heading into the tundra on their ATVs at 5 p.m., 8 p.m., I began to understand that being on the land for the Inuit is not a weekend passion. The land is their home.
For a culture that was seminomadic until the middle of the previous century, when they were forced into permanent settlement by the government, the ice lakes, Arctic shoreline, and tundra are home.
Jeannie motored away from her heated house, full refrigerator, and walls covered in photos of her grandchildren, I realized, because she, like all of us, just wanted to get home after a long day of work.
– Sara Miller Llana is the Americas bureau chief and deputy international news editor for the Monitor.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
I HAVE A CONSPICUOUS, oversize tattoo of a hornet on the left side of my neck. I was stung when I was very young, and it became a core memory that shaped my reaction to basically any flying insect.
Friends would punk me at outdoor events, knowing I had a full-on phobia that extended even to honeybees and especially bumblebees. All it would take was a “bzzz” in my ear, and I’d be on the ground flopping and twisting and swatting at my neck amid a circle of laughter.
But last fall my wife, Petya, and I bought a house in upstate New York. Both of us had lived in New York City apartments for nearly 25 years. Now, suddenly, we and our three lifelong city dogs were living in a farm community.
It’s begun to change us.
On a bright spring morning this past May, I was jolted as I took the dogs out for a joyful, leashless run through our yard. The sound of buzzing was deafening, and it was right above me. My heart was pounding as I ducked and ran into the grass. For a second, I thought there must be a swarm of bees balled up on our porch posts.
Then Pet told me it was coming from our apple tree, which had just bloomed with burgundy-pink flowers, attracting thousands of honeybees.
I’m still trying to understand how what was once a sound of terror almost instantly transformed into one of awe.
Then, a few minutes later, as we sat on our porch behind two large rhododendron bushes, I saw dozens of bumblebees floating between the bright pink blooms. I marveled at their movements.
But mostly, I continue to marvel at how a 50-year phobia seems to have fallen away, as a defiant tattoo becomes a memory of things past.
– Harry Bruinius is a staff writer for the Monitor who splits his time between upstate New York and New York City.
Far away
“OH FUNNY, you still call Minnesota home,” the woman chortled. I’d just met her, a friend of a friend. We were sitting in my friend Mandy’s living room, surrounded by small plates of cut-up apples. Twelve different types in all. An impromptu apple tasting of the local French varieties.
“This reminds me of home,” I’d said.
I suppose it was absurd, coming from someone who’s lived in France for 15 years – a third of my life. Absurd from someone who, on numerous occasions and after a half-decade traveling around the world, has always said, “Home is where your stuff is.”
Technically, that’s true. But it’s also where the little memories reside – creeping onto a plate of apples, freshly cut and popping with all the flavors of a Minnesota autumn.
– Colette Davidson is the Monitor’s Paris correspondent.
SOME YEARS AGO, I moved to Rome from my home in the United States and was blissfully happy. Until Christmas, that is. I found myself deeply missing my family and friends, my familiar customs and traditions. I missed what I thought of as home.
For some reason, this homesickness crystallized around a family practice of gathering, every year, to listen to the actor Boris Karloff read Dr. Seuss’ book “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” (This was not something readily available in Italy back then.) It became for me the symbol of all I felt I was missing.
One night, feeling particularly miserable, I dragged myself to the Wednesday testimony meeting at my local Christian Science church. Rome, of course, is full of beautiful churches. Ours was not one of them. Services were held in the basement of a YMCA. But as soon as I stepped into it, I was filled with the warmth of knowing that I was joining people in churches everywhere who were seeking their true home, which is in God.
After the meeting, I went to dinner with some people who were visiting Rome from my home country. I had never met them before, and I don’t remember how it came up, but I mentioned my love for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” To my amazement, one of them had a cassette of the same recording my family always listened to. She reached into her purse and gave it to me!
That night broadened and transformed my idea of home. It’s not a place but the knowledge of being loved and cared for – even in the small particulars. I’ve lived in many different locations since then, but I’ve learned that no matter where I am, I am always truly “at home.”
– Deborah Johnson, who lives in Columbus, Mississippi, is the author of “The Secret of Magic.”
I’D JUST CHECKED into a youth hostel in Kyoto, Japan, and I needed to get something to eat before it locked up for the night. My problem? I had an all-you-can-eat appetite, and $3 in yen. In the winter of 1979, that wouldn’t buy half an apple.
I wandered around the corner to an open-air market and found an older woman tempura-frying vegetables for people to take home. When I got to the front of the line, I handed her my money, all of it, with a shrug and a smile. In my travels, I’d acquired about 50 words of Japanese and no grammar. She looked at the money and fired off a minute of nonstop questions – in Japanese, of course. When she was finished, I shrugged again and said, in Japanese, “I’m sorry.”
She took a long look at me, came around the counter, took me by the shoulder, and led me to the back of her stall. She pulled an unopened can of cooking oil away from the wall and gestured for me to sit. I did. She took another can and placed it in front of me, covering it with a clean kitchen towel, talking the whole time. She went back to work, frying chunks of sweet potato, onion, eggplant, dried fish, and mushrooms. Every time she cooked an order, she’d make a little extra and bring it to me.
After the first plateful, I thanked her and stood up. She admonished me with a twinkling scowl and firmly sat me back down. She kept up her end of the conversation, and every time she’d look over her shoulder, or pause, I’d say, “Thank you. I’m sorry.”
It took an hour for her to decide I’d had enough. She shooed me off with a soft laugh. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more at home.
– Chuck Wilcoxen lives in Maine with his wife, Hilary. Their nonprofit,Team Long Run, helps children learn to read and play freeze tag.
Lost and found
THE QUEEN BED in the attic glowed silver at 2 a.m., moon shards on the white metal frame. It had come out of a box, along with a heart-sinking collection of screws and hardware. I had cursed it under my breath as I wrenched it together some months earlier, but it ended up solid.
In the wee hours that night, it was a lifeboat. One daughter lay on my right, her little sister on my left, a tumble of heavy limbs and sleep. I listened to their breathing.
Our world had just changed. At the time I would have said shattered, but now I see it more like a snow globe. One shake, and I learned my marriage was over, finances were terrifying, my girls would have to switch schools, and – for some reason this kept hitting me hardest – we would need to move.
The house had never been ours. It was big and beautiful and came with my ex’s job. But we had decided, he and I, that we should treat it like home, for our family’s sake. So I had foolishly fallen in love.
Then, my girls and I moved into a rambling old rental a few towns away, another beautiful house that wasn’t ours. The three of us unpacked and cried and snuggled in the bed together again. Eventually, they began to see that place as home, but I knew better. When I was able, I bought my own house, smaller, simpler, in the woods. It was mine. I loved it. The girls decorated their bedrooms – pink and boho, light blue and elegant. The snow globe settled.
But “home” still felt elusive. We had moved so much, away from where I grew up, away from family, away from their childhoods.
Then, one night, they asked to sleep in my room again. They settled on either side of me. And as I watched the moonlight through my window, I realized home was right there.
It always had been.
– Stephanie Hanes is the Monitor’s environment and climate change writer.