Finding Home.  The Long Walk Home.  Searching for Home.  Redefining Home.  Home Is Where the Heart Is.  There’s No Place Like Home.  Home Is What You Make It. 

Yes.  This is another post about my personal musings on the topic of home.  and I must in all good conscious warn you, that there may be more on the way.  not homes necessarily (but who knows what’s over the horizon) but posts about my first paragraph’s titles.  This is a timely subject for me as I am actively in my search for home and, as usual, am in a redefining sort of mood as well. 

After I was adopted by the White American Older than Most First Time Parents, we lived their dream (or at least mama’s dream) of being an Alaskan Pioneer.  We homesteaded their 160 acre spread of land.  During my growing up years, we cut down trees, built two cabins, gardened, and survived off the land.  Some of the homesteading adventures were interrupted by years of living a rural existence in Maryland along the Eastern Shoreboard.  But in my child’s mind, country was country and the places we lived in Maryland (with one exception in a small village) felt like homesteading as we did not have electricity, water, or indoor plumbing. 

In my adulthood, I have come to refer to places I live/d as _______ Homestead.  Like the Duplex Homestead, the Downtown Homestead, the 10th Avenue Manor Homestead…  But the Attic where I have lived for almost five years has been simply the Attic.  Although the piece of land where the Attic is situated may, indeed, have been someone’s homestead at some point in history, it has been just our Attic.  I have lived here in the Attic for longer than I have lived anywhere in my adult life. 

The Attic has provided a beautiful physical space to live in, a feeling of safety – three floors above the sidewalk and street, as well as shelter during these five years.  The Attic, however, has never felt like my home.  Maybe because I knew that Moving Day was bound to arrive as I was here to attend school and earn a degree.  Maybe because after having moved 50+ times already that I do not know how to put down roots.  Maybe because I am a Korean adoptee who left my original home too early.  Maybe because I need to redefine the word home.  Whatever the reason(s), I am moving on down the road, taking leave of the Attic. 

I will definitely miss this living space.  I wonder if the next place I live will be a Homestead or who knows, maybe just Home.