When I started to think about writing for this prompt, I knew that my answer to “Is home a Place or Person?” had to be both. At least for me.

Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

When I was young, of course home was where I grew up. I assumed that it was where you were living because my parents never referred to the houses where my grandparents lived as home. It might have been different for my father because his parents weren’t living in the apartment where he grew up. But, my mother’s parents still lived in the same place.

After growing up and living in several places with Snake, our house was always home. In fact, few places have not home when I am there with him because he is my home. We can be at home here, in hotels, at the dance studio and just about anywhere where we are together. In fact, some other cities feel like “home” because they are ones that we love to visit together.

There have, however, been a few places where we have been together that don’t feel like home. Usually they are places where we visit, sometimes even regularly, where we have to be on guard. You know that feeling. If you say the wrong thing, everyone judges you. And since this is often family, it just becomes someplace that you go because it is right rather than fun.

So, Charmer, this is all about home being a person, right? Well, I am still weirdly offended by the pictures on the real estate site where the new owners messed up my parent’s house. They took a small but functional kitchen and moved appliances around where no rational cook would want to work. They put in saltillo tile, which having removed it from much of the current house, I can say without reservation is just unconscionable. I ranted at Snake for a long time after seeing the destruction that they wrought on my home.

And our house is our home. We have spent a lot of time making it the way that we want it. And redoing it when the original way doesn’t work for us anymore. It is an ever evolving project. We’ve learned that just because it was sold to us as a living room, we don’t have to use it as that. And bedrooms make great libraries if you don’t need them to be a bedroom.

Our yard is being transformed into an oasis for us. And working together on the projects just makes it more of a home. It is a place, but so much more than a place. It is a keeper of memories and love.