story + photos by Eleanor Freed, Mount Holyoke College
What makes a home a home?
I don’t know exactly. I think it’s about the atmosphere created by the place and the people.
There are five places that come to mind when I think about home: the house where I grew up, my college, my two host families in Japan, and Schoodic.
As a kid growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts, I was so sure I was going to live in that same house on that same dead-end street my whole life. In my childhood mind, someday unfathomably far in the future, my parents would retire and move somewhere cool, and I would stay right where I was. It was comfortable and familiar– why would I want to leave that behind?
The summer after eighth grade, I visited my town’s sister city near Kyoto, Japan, and decided that was where I was going to live one day. In those two weeks, my host family became an anchor for me. Even after such a short time, it took ages for me to adjust to being back in Arlington– I felt so connected to my host family and their home that for a while it seemed odd to be anywhere else.
Four and a half years later, returning to Arlington after my first semester of college, I found that home didn’t feel like home the same way it had for the first eighteen years of my life. I had never been away for that long, and suddenly the pizza place was blue instead of beige and another wing of the new high school had gone up without me being there to witness it. I wasn’t quite the same either– I felt it in the way I talked with my parents and my home friends.
This past semester, I finally achieved the goal I’d had since I was twelve: studying abroad in Japan. It was fitting that I ended up in the Kyoto area again, so close to my first host family. The moment I stepped into the new family’s house, I knew I had been right. We had only met three or four hours before, but already they had switched from polite to casual speech, talking with me like I was one of their own. And over the course of the next few months, I came to feel like I was, and still am even though I’m halfway across the world.
At Schoodic, It took me two weeks, tops, to get comfortable enough to call this place home. I live in an apartment with new friends, some of the most breathtaking nature I’ve ever seen is within walking distance, I can play tunes in the backyard, and we all waltz into each other’s apartments unannounced. The community both at Schoodic and in Downeast Maine is unlike any I’ve experienced before. I see so many of the same faces at contra dances from week to week, and half the people I talk to about my research already have an interest in rockweed. Meeting new people has always stressed me out, but it hasn’t felt quite so nerve-wracking here.
Maybe home is a place that changes you. For the first time, I’ve seen my own scientific experiment through from start to finish, something I’ve felt like I’d never be ready to do, and something that has been incredibly rewarding. At the same time, my personal comfort zone has expanded far beyond where I could have expected. Before this summer, I’ve never been brave enough to sing if there was even the possibility that someone else could hear. Now, I sing along to songs in the car, and in the kitchen when I’m cooking alone with my headphones on.
Whenever I’m back in Arlington on school breaks, I can feel the newer parts of myself slipping. How much will stick when I leave Schoodic?
Maybe home is a place where a version of you lives, ready for you to step back into whenever you stop by. Maybe home is something transient, a place you’re tethered in soul even when you aren’t there. Places you drift back to when you’re not being pulled in another direction.
What makes a home a home?
I don’t think home is just a place, or just a person. The place needs the people. Home is where I have my privacy and my people, somewhere where I can find joy and love and connection and where I can hide away when I need to. Home is where even the silences are comfortable, and I’m happy to see whoever walks in the door.
