Keeping close to home

For the past 20 years of my life, if I were to close my eyes and picture “home,” I would automatically think of Portland, Ore., and the house I grew up in — its crimson front door, the kitchen where I spent countless dinners laughing the night away with my family and friends, the backyard where I would stay up late playing badminton by
starlight.

My house seemed to be a magical dwelling throughout my childhood years, and even as I got older, it felt secure to return to its warm embrace every time I pulled into the driveway.

In my house, nothing could harm me; it would always be there no matter where I went and forever possess the same sense of comfort beaming through its sturdy walls and high vaulted ceilings.

This past year, however, my indelible image of home evolved.

In the span of five years, I lost my mother to ovarian cancer, and just before my freshman year at IU, my father passed away from a heart attack.

As I left my house in Portland in August 2008, starting college at IU felt like a fresh start, a place where I sink my feet into the community and find a new sense of home.

Between meeting my hall mates in my dorm, walking onto an athletic team and attending all on-campus events possible, I delighted in wrapping myself in the Bloomington community.

I tried hard not to think about my house in Oregon, concentrating my focus on Bloomington as my new and only home.

Each day seemed to add an additional brick to the foundations of my newfound sense of home at IU. I came here knowing no one, yet I was soon building a family that I could laugh and share with.

Life continued this way until last November, when I was suddenly hit with the realization that my house in Portland had to be sold and my father’s estate closed. All of the stress was too much to deal with halfway across the country, so I decided to spend the spring semester in Portland to take care of business.

Over the next seven months, I worked hard to get my house on the market, and on Sept. 2, the keys were placed in the hands of their new owner.

As I drove back across the country to IU, a new anxiety began to fill me: now that I no longer have a house in Portland, where is home?

For the past two years, I had considered Bloomington to be my home, but had always felt the security of having a house as my “true home” back in Portland.

Although I had tried so hard to distance myself from referring to Portland as my home, my attachment to Oregon lingered somewhere between the cool Pacific Ocean and the sun rising over Mount Hood on a fall morning.

When I started college, I thought I had to choose to view home as being in Portland or Bloomington, but I’ve come to find that home is not an all-or-nothing concept.

As college students, we are fortunate enough to cultivate multiple images of home. It doesn’t have to be embodied in the house where you grew up and need not be attached to an address.

It can be found in the laughter you share over a late-night ice cream with your roommate. It can be found in cheering on your team at the homecoming game. It can be found in a philosophy discussion with your classmates and professors.

Why settle for one definition of home? Why work hard to make home a solitary, immovable concept?

For our college years and the rest of our lives, let’s find a sense of home in wherever we go. Whether your distance from your hometown is three hours by car or 10 hours by plane, know that you’re not as far away from home as you think.

In fact, you’re there right now, and if you carry that sense with you wherever you go, you will always be at home.