Can we go home again?

For the last two years, I've been working on a new play that is about to be performed over Thanksgiving weekend: The Home Show. I was inspired to write the play after realizing (a long time ago) that the question, "Where's home?" caused me to stutter and stumble. It wasn't that I couldn't remember my address. (No, not there yet). No, it's just that I can't answer honestly.

In a 1940 novel, Thomas Wolfe wrote, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood...back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame...back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

Is home where we are raised?

When I think of home -- my true home -- it's where I lived with my parents and siblings as a child up until the age of 15. I was brought home as a newborn to the apartment in West New York, NJ. I can recall the smell of a turkey cooking on Thanksgiving day, map out the apartments in our building and name the families who lived in them. Every nook and cranny of 162 - 59th Street is indelibly preserved in my memory: My father, an unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette between two fingers, sitting at the formica table, reading The Daily News or studying his Racing Form. My mother on her hands and knees waxing the linoleum floor till it glowed. My brother on the avocado-green couch watching Fred and Ginger float across a ballroom floor in a musical on the console TV. My sister's glamorous (to me) wardrobe hanging on her side of the closet, her collection of records and books introducing me to a changing world outside the walls of our apartment in the 1960s and '70s. Our shaggy, black and white dog, Max, who came to live with us when I was 7, curled up on the red carpet in my bedroom. This was home. Until it was not.

Is home a roof and four walls where you feel safe?

The majority of people I interviewed as research for my play said that home was where one felt safe. Their comment made me pause. I've been fortunate throughout my life. I've never lived in a home with domestic violence or unsafe neighborhoods. So, safety was not front of mind when I defined home; I took it as a given. Shame on me.

When I was 15, I went to live with my aunt and cousin in Miami. (I was a rebellious teenager, and this was how my parents dealt with me.) If the definition of home is a shelter where one is safe, then I had a place to "call" home for 2.5 years. While I thrived at my new high school, made wonderful friendships, was cared for by my aunt, it wasn't my home. It was my aunt and cousin's. I was a guest who overstayed her welcome.

Is home where your parents live?

After high school, I returned "home" to New Jersey the summer before starting college, but the home I returned to was not the home I grew up in. My parents had moved from our cozy apartment into a trailer, and while I was with my family, had a roof over my head, and felt safe -- the three major factors people use to define home, -- it did not feel like the home I'd lived in for the first 15 years of my life. I felt like more of a visitor there than I did in Miami. South Jersey was a foreign place compared to the North Jersey where I'd been raised.

Is home the geographical place you were raised?

When I started college, I returned to North Jersey and then moved to NYC, I felt a stronger sense of "home". People sounded like me, interacted like I did, and the energy of the city fit my own. I lived in five different apartments within six years and was in perpetual motion -- two jobs, classes, social life -- but it mostly felt like home. Home was not a physical building, or immediate family, but a sense of belonging that came with familiarity and acceptance by others.

Can we create new homes?

At 23, I moved to North Dakota. I knew two people in the entire state -- the friend who introduced me to my new boyfriend -- and the boyfriend. I would travel 1511 miles away from the west Village and the apartment I called "home" for 2 years. I left without a second glance backward. With my freshly minted college diploma, I was on an adventure and looking forward to my new house on the prairie. It did not dawn on my 23-year old brain that I was leaving "home" behind forever.

I still live in that little house on the prairie -- except, since it's actually in a university town -- it bears no resemblance to the one Laura Ingalls wrote about in her novels. I've been in the same house for 37 years. This house in which I sit and type has been a home to my four children and my husband. It has four walls, a new roof, and I feel safe here. My parents are gone, my brother is gone, and my sister lives in Florida. The six years I lived in NYC seem like a life that belongs to someone else as do my high school years in Miami. I've lived in North Dakota for almost 2/3 of my life; I don't expect to leave. But -- if you ask me where I'm from, I'm going to say, "Jersey." If you ask me where I live, I will say North Dakota. But if you ask me where home is -- well, that's complicated. Do you want the short answer or the long?

Can we go home again?

I guess that depends on how you define home. To me, home is a feeling of rootedness you do not question. Like a tree growing in a forest, it does not expect to be moved. Can it be transplanted? Maybe. Will it thrive? Possibly. Will it always feel like something is just a little bit "off"? I think so.

Every place after that original home in West New York, NJ has felt like a rest stop on the journey of this life. I am grateful for all of the places I've lived and the people who took me in and shared space with me, but when you ask me, "Where's home?" my mind immediately flashes to that little apartment where I grew up hearing stray cats calling in the alley at night, dinners at 5 p.m. sharp, and baths in the claw footed tub. The place where I'd lie in bed at night while the TV murmured in the living room, and I'd trace the cracks on the ceiling, wondering where they would go next.

What do you say when you are asked, "Where's home?" You can read what others have said in response to this question here: Home Project .