Home Is...

Home.  It's not a place.  It's a thing.  I'm finally beginning to realize that.  We've been looking at houses recently.  Our current house is a little too small.  It only has 3 bedrooms and we have 6 people.  We love to have family to our house, but we don't have a dining room to entertain.  Our play room is seeping into the family room.  You saw the basement pictures last week.  We're starting to outgrow this house. So we were looking at new houses.  Some had more bedrooms, some had more bathrooms, some had more living space, some had LESS living space.  I tried to picture our family living in each of these houses, but not a single one was HOME.  Home is something you can't really BUY.  I can buy another house.  A bigger house.  A better house.  But I can't buy another HOME.
A new house won't have a chip of paint missing in the dining area from where my mom scrubbed so hard to take the paint transfer from the chair off the wall that she took part of the wall off.  This was when she was cleaning our house when we were on vacation.  Every time I see it I think about how hard she worked to clean my home so it was clean when I walked in the door with bags full of dirty laundry and sand.  I think how lucky I am that I have a mom that will do that for me.  And the gouges in the door in the Florida room from the dogs pawing to come in.  Those dogs are gone now, but their marks remain.  A new house won't have a drawer in the bathroom with bigs hunks removed from the time Ellie barricaded herself in the bathroom and Evan started to destroy the drawer to get her out.  An outsider looking at all these things would see them as flaws.  I don't.  I see them as little memories, sprinkled around me that I see every day.  My friend, who is also outgrowing her house, said she's hesitant to move because she brought her kids home from the hospital to her current house.  How silly.  Who cares where you take them when you bring them home?  I understand exactly what she means, though.  It's not where you take them, it's the memory that goes with it.  I feel the same way.   This house holds a  big place in so many of my memories, of holiday, big events and everyday things. So I think I'm going to give up house hunting for awhile.  (The voyeur in me LOVES looking at pictures of homes for sale online, though.) I'm not ready yet.  We're outgrowing this house, but we haven't outgrown it yet.  It's going to take one amazing house for me to want to leave this home.