Home

What is home? Is it the place where we eat and sleep? Is it the place where we feel more at peace? Is it the people we share our lives with? Is it all of those options put together? Is it neither? Do we all have a home?

My home is my family and my friends. The people I love and the people who love me. Where I feel at peace. But does everybody feel that way? Does everybody have that?

Foster children, for example, move from one foster home to the other, have foster parents after foster parents. They don’t know what it’s like to have someone always there for them. Sometimes they don’t even have time to make friends before they are moved to another place. Or if they do make friends, they lose them after they leave. For these children it is hard to find a place they can call home. But sometimes, even if they don’t have a place they can call home, they can find things that make them feel at home. Sometimes it is a book, sometimes it is music, and sometimes it is school. Anything that makes them feel happy and at peace.

For some people, home is not the roof over our heads. Some people feel at home when they are outdoors, going wherever they want, discovering new things, new cultures, new people. Some people travel all their lives and that is the only way they can feel at home. They feel at home when they breathe fresh air, when they fall asleep looking at the stars. Whether they’re looking at the sky in England, or in France, it doesn’t matter, just as long as they’re outdoors.

Some people even say they feel at home in a shopping mall. Window shopping, buying clothes, spending their money on things they don’t really need but want to have because it makes them feel good.

We all have our own idea of home. What is home for one person isn’t home for another. But whether it’s a book, school, the world around us or a shopping mall, we all have one thing in common. When someone asks us what home is, one sentence comes to our minds: Home is where the heart is.