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home  sweet homes   by Yee-Fan Sun | 1 2 3 4

I lived on campus all during college, but school was always school, its ivy-covered brick walls the place where I lived, played, and crammed for exams each September through May, a transient roof over my head.  Home, on the other hand, was still that red-painted house on the edges of suburban Boston, the place where I’d grown up.  Each autumn I eagerly packed up my belongings to move back to school; each summer, I did the same to schlep my stuff back home. Home wasn’t a matter of where I was happiest – I loved the freedom of living on my own at school as much as I liked the security, cable television and free home-cooked meals that came with summers spent back at my parents’ place. School was great fun, but home -- that was about roots, permanence, having a place I knew I could always return to.

Home was an anchor, but in the post-college years, the tether grew longer and longer. With a college degree and not a semblance of a clue concerning what to do with it, I wandered the far reaches of the globe in a dedicated effort to avoid making any real decisions about the future. I lived in D.C. and Italy; I traveled in England, visited relatives in Taiwan. I spent as much time away as I did at home, and my friends began to begin their emails with, “So what country are you in today?”  But I always came home, eventually at least, to the shelter of the pink-curtained bedroom with the Marimekko-flower print wallpaper, a constant since my elementary school days, something familiar and comforting to rely upon. At least until the travel itch re-surfaced and I’d get antsy to hop on a plane again.

Live like a nomad for too long and it’s amazing how soon the excitement wears off. During a year spent living in The Middle of Nowhere, Australia, in a small town made tolerable only by the presence of my boyfriend, I found myself afflicted with the first true bout of homesickness I’d ever experienced in my entire life. In a cave-like apartment furnished with mismatched folding chairs, and what turned out to be a flea-ridden sofa, I’d lie down to sleep at night on a makeshift Thermarest bed and cry till my eyes were swollen. I loved living with my honey, sharing a kitchen, doing laundry together even, but I hated that apartment and loathed the town. I couldn’t wait to finish up our year there and return home to Boston at last. That year away from Boston, more than a lifetime of actually living there, bred my irrational and fervent love for the city I consider I my true hometown. I missed old buildings and autumn foliage, clam chowder and Italian subs, the Charles River and the T. I missed being in a place where I felt like I belonged.

keep wandering this way!

---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home.