Home is where...?

I did a funny thing this weekend...  I rented a car and checked into a hotel in the city that I've come to call home.  After living in Atlanta for 6 and a half years, there's just something odd about staying in a hotel here.  I've been back to Atlanta several times since leaving, but have always stayed with friends and gotten friends to pick me up at the airport and it has generally just felt like coming home.  But it feels very different to actually be staying in a hotel!  But it also makes you think!  What was the first time you called the place you live now home?

Home has always been a very important concept to me.  I was born and raised in the same town.  I lived in Vernon for 18 years.  To me, that will always be home, no matter what.  Even though I haven't lived there full time for more than 10 years now.  But go ahead, ask me where I'm from!  The majority of the time, I will still answer New Jersey.  And for the longest time, where I'm from and where is home were one in the same.

Looking down the valley from the Appalachian Trail in Vernon, NJ, my home town

I also don't like change.  I went to college, and by the time I graduated four years later, I had come to call Notre Dame home.  But it took me the better part of 3 years to do so!  I really can't say exactly at what the moment I first thought this, but I can point to a distinct trip back to NJ during junior year where I was asked when I went back to ND, and I answered by saying I was going home the next day.  That caught me off guard, because it was completely unintentional!  Eventually I learned that calling some place new home doesn't mean abandoning your old home, that you can always call two places home!  And to this day, I still affectionately think of ND as home, because I learned so much in my time there (and not just the academic lessons I learned in class).  It's a special place to me, as are the friends I made in my time there, and that will never change.

The Dome and Basilica across St. Mary's Lake

Now, Notre Dame I knew I'd love, but Atlanta's a different story.  I moved to Atlanta for school, and that's it, but in under 2 years here, I had discovered that change can be good, and it didn't take long for me to consider this place home.  I think the first time I called Atlanta home was from a plane.  After getting my pilot's license around here, I got to know the skyline and airspace very well.  One time, flying back from NJ, I looked out the window and saw the midtown skyline below, and just got that familiar feeling of coming home.

What really surprised myself was when I went to Italy for a conference, and somebody asked me where I was from, and I responded, without really thinking about it, that I was from Atlanta...  It would take another year or two before I was willing to say that, but only after first saying that I'm originally from New Jersey.  "Originally from"...  I'm not sure if this is really true, but I feel like this is a very New Jersey concept (or at least the northeast, because so few people actually stay near the home town).  Everybody I know from back home has someplace they're from, and someplace they're originally from!  And most of my friends from other places don't seem to use that phrase nearly as much!

Probably my favorite picture of Atlanta, as seen below the wing of a Cessna 172

By the third time around, I now have a very different concept of what it means to accept somewhere as home.  It's someplace you enjoy, that you can think of as your own, and where you know you will always have people who you cherish (even if they're now they've found new homes of their own).  And that it doesn't mean giving up the other places you consider home.  Even after just under 6 months, it already feels like home.

And to answer that initial question, it was back in early April and I was driving the first time I called DC home, and I almost drove off the road because of it!  I was headed to the National Air & Space Museum one night to meet a friend and some of her coworkers, and just the fact that at 9 pm I was just running to the National Air & Space Museum on a whim (the whole thing was conceived just that afternoon) was pretty exciting.  I was coming from the gym, which I'd done a pretty good job of making a habit, so things were starting to feel familiar.  I was on the George Washington Parkway, which runs along the south side of the Potomac River in Virginia, and at one point the trees between the road and the river cleared and I was suddenly right across from downtown DC, looking at the National Mall, with the Washington Monument and Capitol Building all lit up and bright white.  It was a pretty cool sight!  And I realized that this was where I lived now, this was home!  And then I felt my front right tire scrape the curb, which promptly sent me into a panic...  Thankfully I did not drive off the road, because apparently that night had more in store for me to discover... :-)

The National Mall as seen from the south side of the Potomac (also the only picture in this post that's not my own)