Where You Are Is Who You Are

By the time I was 18 I had moved 18 times, at 29 I have totalled 27 moves, I have only a few more to meet my age again. Today I find myself longing for a home, not a place to live but a home, resonating in warmth and safety a place to set myself out and gather myself up.

Frances Mayes writes "Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave." Perhaps the transience of the places that I have chosen in my life are a reflection of a need for freedom or more correctly my need to continually be starting over and renewing. Unfortunately the choice has had the opposite effect and I find myself peeled away and left behind in so many makeshift homes that I barely exist as I want to anymore.

These thoughts have me piecing together fragments of an ideal home although a shaky image they have strong feeling. Streaming sunlight through sparkling windows, clean whites tones with earthy reds and oranges. Mint tea brewing a conversation with the succulents on the window sill. Brazilian music winding it's way around the house, fresh carrots and greens humming along in the garden. Day's spent in galoshes, a desk looking on a wall of images, lovingly collected and haphazardly pinned. Provocatively red tomatoes topped with mozzarella and basil, spelt banana bread baking a sweet pungent smell and me playing in the yard.