Home Is...

[poliphilo]

That may have been our last protracted stay at the old house. We've left essential furniture in place, but it's looking denuded and sorry. Emotionally I seem to be coping. I keep asking myself if I'm OK and the answer thus far has been, "Sure".

Last time we put the house on the market I had to choose between withdrawing it or having a nervous breakdown. The difference this time is- I suppose- that selling up is only part of a larger plan. Last time we didn't really know what we were going to do next.

Also the old house no longer feels like home. Question: What is there left to keep us in Oldham? Answer: Ailz's mother. Quite.

Today I've been processing the things we brought down in the car. Our pictures are going up on the walls, our books are filling the cupboards. The farm isn't exactly home, but it's getting to feel more and more like it.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I found that living in our Copenhagen apartment for a month after the movers piled all the "important" stuff in a container and it started slowly moving across the Atlantic, made it much easier to say goodbye to our once-home. By then, with only a few chairs and an inflatable mattress, it had ceased to be a home and was really just a dwelling. There's a big difference between those two words.

I hope you will soon have a home. Perhaps you should have brought more junk, because I actually find that "stuff" is part of what makes me feel at home here in Houston. The fact that I have my weird boxes of extra cables, high-school letters and so on is really nice when I have occasional bursts of feeling dislocated. And I guess you can always go outside; you seem to be the sort of person who is very much at home outside.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, we're here indefinitely and I have no idea when we'll have a place of our own again so for the time being we'll have to make do with having our stuff to hand.

And you're right, it makes a huge difference. I'm sitting at my mother's table but the coasters on it are ones we brought back from Belgium and the teapot stand is one we bought in a charity shop last year and several of the photographs on the shelf to my left are
ones I took and none of these things have any value to speak of, but they're ours and that's what matters..

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Value is what value brings! During our move the top of my great-grandmother's cousin's pedestal broke in two, and the insurance will not cover the repair as it's more than the item's value. Well, not to me!

(I mean, I fully understand that they will only cover a certain amount, and to be quite honest that amount is probably higher because it's an American insurance company, so a piece of furniture from around 1900 is seen as very rare and they will pay out the full insurance sum which is more than the piece is worth on the Danish market for sure! I mean, it's an ugly old piece of Danish Victoriana, and quite frankly I'm not even sure it could be sold for five quid!)

But there's monetary value and there's real value to the owner, and I bet each of those coasters bring you more value in your day-to-day life than if they were antique sterling silver!Just like I love my ugly old pedestal that I've had since I was 5 because nobody else wanted it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The coasters are in primary colours and shaped like funny little fat men- rather like Pere Ubu. Also they link together to form a ring. They make me smile.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Felt like this when I needed to spend a last might in his mum's house in Stirling once it had been cleared to clear up some legal stuff.

Strange feeling.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You take the belongings out of a home and it turns into a house.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

It's a good point: what really makes a home? FSM knows, I've moved plenty of times, and I'm still not entirely sure - but it does involve the area, not just the domicile. Which only serves to complicate the question, for me, even if it's probably more valid - where is home?

I don't really know, I'm afraid. *sigh* I know where I was born, and remain very fond of (and hey, toss me £750k and I'll show you a magnificent gastropub. It's so sad to see the place empty, when back in the day, it was the focus of local social life. I so loved hearing Terry Wogan's voice out of the speakers we had on the hifi, all made by a family friend), and a few locations I'm especially contented in, but I don't live in any of them.

Maybe the old chestnut sums it up best - "home is where the heart is"?