“Home” is a word full of meaning, meaning that changes from person to person.

When I hear the word home, I think of Racine, where I now live and grew up. But beyond that, I see my current house, as well as the houses I lived in as a child. I think of the places that still feel like home to me in Colorado. Home encompasses friends that know me deeply, tents I’ve woken up in in the mountains, as well as certain memories and feelings from my youth. For me, home is as much about a place as it is about how what I did there and who I did it with.

Home may carry feelings of comfort, safety, and nostalgia. For some, it may be a harder concept to reckon with.

There’s an anthology of poems I come back to often titled “Home,” put together by poet Christian Wiman. The book explores exactly that: home. I’ve been picking the book up more since I’ve moved back to Racine and moved into my own home. I’m constantly asking myself what home means to me, both in relationship to place and time.

Here are a few snippets of the works collected in that book that are shaping how I think about home.

Moving In
By Audre Lorde

“It is the worst of luck to bring
into a new house from the old
bread salt or broomstick.”

Salt Bread and Broom
be still.
I leave you guardian
against gone places
I have loved
your loss
in a green promise
making new
Salt
Bread
and Broom
remove me from the was
I still am
to now
becoming
here this house
forever blessed.

From Beyond Belief
By John Koethe

“The hard part
Is to find yourself at home with where and what you are
And still remain amazed.”

The Niagara River
By Kay Ryan

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

Home as newness, home as acceptance, home as a resting place amidst the unavoidable, and hardly graspable, passage of time.

Wiman says “home is a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.”

I live in a house that previously belonged to my grandparents. I love that their essence fills my days, even a they’ve passed. It’s bittersweet, the way the passage of time makes itself known as I walk the halls and find notes and nails left behind. This place is new days and past days. It’s comfort of family. It’s a reckoning of where I am and where I’m going.

I started jotting down notes about this house and my feelings of home over the past week.

Here’s where that poem-in-progress stands.

Home

Red brick and pipe tobacco,
holes in walls of photos once hung,
a postcard from Taos replaced a copper cross.
I am embarassed by the fresh coats of paint.
It is both yours and mine,
and everyone’s—how we imagine home.
Wood creaks and walls shift
under the weight of generations,
holidays passed, and lives too.
The morning light is amazing
in the springtime living room.
I wonder if you knew this.
The garden beds are barely standing,
but there’s the shed and the canoe.
Rhubarb and mint return
faithfully, as do the robins.
I open the door,
there you are.

Best,
L.A. Sklba