I live in San Diego, and for the past thirty years I have used the name of that city as a point of reference when asked where is my home. I checked Websters for definition and learned that home  is the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household… but I have moved around a lot, so I can’t relate easily to the idea of living permanently in one place.   I don’t get the “now I’m home” feeling when I drive through that place in Arkansas where I was a child or when I drive, as I did today, through the streets of Yuba City, California, where I taught for ten reasonably contented years when I was a young man.  When I lived for four years in Singapore, I lived in a house on Geenmead Avenue.  I called it home even though I knew I wouldn’t live there permanently.  I came back to The States to live for a time in the Washington, D.C. area… and then I was for a another time headmaster of Darrow School in what is known as Upstate New York; and since I moved from there, I have lived in San Diego… But I’m wondering today if I am now or if I have ever been “at home.”  

In the May, 2012, issue of the Smithsonian Magazine Verlyn Klinkenborg says about home, “whatever else home is—and however it enters our consciousness—it’s a way of organizing space in our minds. Home is home, and everything else is not-home. That’s the way the world is constructed.”  

Finding home is a work in progress.