Home is.....

So I rented an apartment today. Not that crazy of a thing. This is the 4th apartment that I have lived in since leaving my parents home, but it got me thinking about what home is.

I am sure that you have heard the speech the late George Carlin gives about "stuff" and that home is just a place where you store all your stuff, but I guess I have some romanticized vision of what home is and what home should be. I guess, I haven't really felt like I have had a "home" since college and after I left the nest.

Yes, I have been married, I lived with my wasband in a place that we kind of decorated and picked out all the pieces, furniture, and other lifely things one gets for the place that they store their stuff and where they come home to. But we never had a home. And before the marriage as I lived on my own in one of my various apartments, it was never a place that I could consider a home. So, what is it? What makes a home a home?

Family? Does that make it? Although, my biological family has, for the most part, all moved away from this area, with the exception of my brother, I feel as though many of my friends are in a way my family. Just this past weekend I somehow arranged 10 of my close friends to come out and celebrate my birthday and my turning older, and I remember feeling happy, loved, and melded into something, that created a whole, even if just for awhile. Was that my home? My friends?

I don't know, maybe the concept of home just shifts from a place where you become part of a whole with your family, into a place where you store your stuff so that you can go out and have "home" with your new "family". I guess I have to start planning more get-togethers now that I have discovered something that feels like my "home". Ohhh, and maybe I can re-rent that mini-van!