I like to think that our lives are burned into places like the negative of a photograph. The film is not the story, but it is the carrier of the story. Imagine if we could take this earth into a photographer’s dark room and develop it. What stories we would see there, carved by light into the very bricks and trees and stones!

Those eloquent Welsh folks have a word for something we vagabond Americans can’t seem to name: hiraeth. It means something like homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or even a home that never existed at all; an intense longing for one’s motherland; a grief-tinged nostalgia for the lost places in the world where one’s heart once fit.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of home a lot over the past year and a half. Pete and I have settled into what is in many ways the house of our dreams, or at least a work in progress towards the house of our dreams, which may or may not be the home we build for the long term. In the hope that we’re putting down roots, my parents decided (with our enthusiastic blessing) to move closer to us, which means they are preparing to sell the house of my childhood, the one place in the world that has ever truly been home to me. And in the midst of all this, somehow, inexplicably, unfathomably, I turned 40. So here I stand, teetering on the edge of my fifth decade on earth, teetering between the home-gone and the home-to-be, staring down the second half of my life and daring it to do its worst—and its best. And feeling, occasionally, a sharp twinge of hiraeth.

I know that many in our transient culture like to talk about home in terms of people—home can be anywhere as long as you’re with people whom you love and who love you—and I certainly don’t deny that family and community are inseparable from the concept. But it is precisely the placeness of home that I am interested in: the incarnate reality of it, the dirt and the roof and the bones of it. My deep longing is rooted in earth. Perhaps this is because I am acutely sensitive to setting—which is ironic, because I’m not especially observant. I miss things that are right in front of me, and I accidentally walk into trees and telephone poles. But places have a kind of scent to me—an emotional scent. I wish I could name a new sense for it: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and placefeeling. In books, setting is as important to me as character. Setting is a character. Avonlea, Middle-earth, Narnia, the Hundred Acre Wood, Port William—each place has its own voice, its own aroma. Each leaves a different footprint on my heart.

The placefeeling of the house I grew up in is utterly unique, and soon it will be only a memory. And I’m ready for that change. It’s time. I know that the story imprinted upon that spot of earth is a story that, for me, lies in the past. It’s a story of daughterness, and I am a wife now. When that house, standing empty now, is finally sold, a character in my story will die. And that is necessary, and as it should be, but the change of setting carries a grieving with it. Though I have lived in many places in my adult life, there is no other place in the world—yet—that is home for me in quite the same way, in the very deepest sense.

But what do I mean by that, exactly, beyond simple nostalgia? What is this earthly, tangible thing called home, and why do we attach such deep emotions to it?

The first word that comes to mind is the obvious one, perhaps: sanctuary. A safe, sheltered place, wrapping us in its protective presence. The place to which we can retreat, where we are loved and understood, where the evils and complexities of the world outside are temporarily held at bay, where we can find peace and rest.

But many places in the world can be sanctuaries. Only one or two of those places can be home. So I will refine my definition:

Home is sanctuary and story intersecting at a single point.

To say that one feels “immediately at home” somewhere is a little like the idea of love at first sight. There can be a core of authentic emotion there, but it’s not really love yet—and it’s not really home yet. Love and home both involve the longevity of a story. They are not platitudes but plots, packed with action and conflict and redemption. They require the turning of many pages.

Going home, when I was in my 20s and 30s, was always like standing on a mountain looking down over a city, seeing the whole in one glance. Home was the high point where I could gaze down upon the entirety of my story. There was a sense of timelessness there. I would wake up in the morning in the bedroom of my girlhood and suddenly it could be any morning in that story. All of the moments were present to me at once.

There are many settings we pass through in the stories of our lives, but not all of them are safe havens. There are many sanctuaries in the world, but not all of them carry the pages of our story like the worn covers of a beloved book.

I am well aware that the chance to grow up in a single stable environment was a rare and profound gift. My husband and many other people I know can’t point to a specific house that holds most or all of their childhood (much less half a lifetime) in its embrace. My niece and nephews of the Warren have received a similar gift—I watch them wearing down the paths of their childhood through rooms stained lovely with laughter, bounding towards the aging oak tree with a gentle white giant of a dog, building their fantasies with sticks and moss in a quiet green wood, and I know that someday they will weep with thankfulness for the story that is written upon this little hidden sanctuary on a tumultuous earth.

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