Mine’s very specific.

The table is still going strong. It’s a good table, and it’s held up all these years. My parents got their kitchen table for $50 at a garage sale thirty years ago, when they were students at Boston College. That was for the table and four chairs.

A month ago I flew to Wisconsin to meet my brand new niece. I shuttled back and forth between my parents’ house and sister’s house. In a heart-to-heart with my mom at my parents’ kitchen table, the one that is still going strong, I told her I have always appreciated their house. My parents bought their house 27 years ago this week.

Recently at my running group, which Raja refers to as my beer group since we run and then drink beer on Wednesday nights, I was talking with a few of the others about the concept of home. One friend from the group is Egyptian but grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He only visited Egypt in the summers as a kid, but felt strongly connected to the Egyptian diaspora, and later moved here to the US. Similar to Raja, in some ways. Another friend spent part of his childhood in Israel but no longer feels connected there.

We talked about home and identity: how you can live somewhere for a long time and never feel at home there, or live away from somewhere for a long time but still feel it is home. Like this couple at my church who will never stop considering Sri Lanka home, even though they’ve been in the US for decades.

Raja has a much more complicated relationship than me to home. Half Egyptian, half Jordanian, he was born and raised in Jordan but with Egyptian citizenship. Now, he’s a green card holder in the US and a relatively new immigrant (and what a time to immigrate to the United States am I right!), soon to become a US citizen, living in Massachusetts. His heart is somehow split between his new home here and his old home there.

Driving home from my running group that night, thinking about all this, I felt such a sense of gratitude, fresh and clear as the star-lined sky. Because while Raja’s and my friends’ situations aren’t bad, my sense of home was so clearly centered in contrast.

Specifically, home for me is 224 Glendale Ave, Milwaukee, WI.

No silly, I’m not giving you my parents’ real address. This is a fake one.

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My parents moved 9 times between when I was born and when I turned four, cycling through several cities and apartments while they looked for somewhere to settle. Just before I turned four they settled at 224, where they’ve stayed ever since.

I only remember growing up in that house, and have no memories from before. I remember racing with my older sister on roller skates in the back door, clunk-clunk-clunking up the few stairs into the kitchen, and then charging through the downstairs and out the front door before clunk-clunk-clunking down the porch steps onto the front lawn.

Or hosting puppet shows on the spiral staircase, also with my sister, lying flat on our bellies on the upstairs landing to dangle the puppets below and make them dance and talk for the stairs-based audience.

Or practicing “flying” by jumping repeatedly off the top bunk bed in the girls’ room – the room I shared with my two sisters. When my brother was born, he got the 3^rd bedroom, so the girls’ room always remained the girls’ room.

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I’ve always had a travel bug. (It’s true that just in this last year, I had to ask myself where it had gone. But I used to have it for sure!) One day in my high school Spanish class, the teacher mentioned a mission trip to Guatemala that summer. She said if anyone was interested in learning more they should stay after class.

I stayed after class.

That was how I ended up going on my first international trip: a mission trip to Guatemala with a church group that summer. I was 16. I was hooked on the excitement of traveling, of being somewhere that you’ve never been before. I had the chance to visit Costa Rica a year later, as part of an educational program run by the nonprofit my dad was leading at the time, and Guatemala again two years later.

When applying to colleges, I wrote my personal essay about my time in Guatemala because it had been so impactful on me. (I was at a time in my life when I didn’t yet see the problem with mission trips.) I dreamed of becoming fluent in Spanish and having some flashy international career with lots of travel to Latin America.

All this changed when I discovered I loved Arabic upon quite randomly deciding to take a beginner Arabic class in my first semester of college.

Spanish was out; Arabic was in.

I began to dream of becoming fluent in Arabic and having some flashy international career with lots of travel to the Middle East. (This is now so funny to think about. At age 18, I had NO idea what I was in for. I did end up speaking Arabic and traveling a lot to the Middle East, but I would not say my career is flashy.)

And even before traveling to Jordan for the first time to study abroad, I spent one summer wandering around a bunch of organic farms in Ecuador with my sister.¹ For a break from the farms, we wandered over to Peru to see Machu Picchu.  

224 was always the steady launch pad from which I catapulted out on my travels. If I hadn’t had that, I wonder if I would have gone where I went or done what I did. Or moved overseas. It was always there, a solid base. It has never budged. (I’m sure I’ll be devastated if/when that day comes when my parents need to sell the house; no pressure, mom and dad.)

Home is sitting at my parents’ 30-year-old kitchen table with Van Morrison playing on the Bluetooth speaker, watching my dad chop vegetables at the kitchen counter, and enjoying a Milwaukee pale ale with him and talking about the latest turns in his work or mine.

Home is going to sleep in the girls’ room and looking around at the familiar decorations that haven’t changed much since I was a little kid. (My parents have only switched out the bunk beds for a double bed as the girls have grown and acquired partners/spouses.) Home is sitting on the little loveseat in the living room listening to my brother play a thundering piece on the grand piano my parents inherited from my great grandparents.

The house is a medium-sized Milwaukee bungalow, but we always think of it as a Mary Poppins bag of a house. It seems to sleep however many people it needs to. Over the years it’s housed me and my family, and a foster brother, and two foreign exchange students, and a couple in need of a place to stay for several months, and many a traveler passing through.

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I remember talking to my sister Mary before I moved to Amman at age 22. I was daunted by my own plan: moving there for this humanitarian aid job and figuring everything else out on the fly. Most of my friends were staying in Boston. Was I making a mistake? “Look,” she said, “let’s say it’s a disaster. A total flop. Worst case, in three months you move back in with mom and dad for a little bit, get back on your feet, then go do something else. Who cares???”

This gave me the safety, the possible off ramp, which allowed me to take the on-ramp in the first place.

A few years later, I remember talking to Mary before she moved to NYC at age 23. She was daunted by her new plan. “Look,” I said, “let’s say it’s a disaster. A total flop. Worst case, in three months you move back in with mom and dad for a little bit, get back on your feet, then go do something else. Who cares???”

Perhaps this gave her the safety to take her own on-ramp. (And now she’s thriving in NYC!)

Here in my Arlington, MA apartment, which also feels like home albeit in a less cosmic and permanent way, I run my hand along the edge of the kitchen table Raja and I bought off of Craigslist when we moved here 18 months ago. It’s also a good table. Slightly longer and skinnier than mom and dad’s. A nice wood, light and smooth. I wonder if it will be our own forever table, in our yet-to-be-discovered forever home.

What 224 provides me is more than just a place to stay when I go to Wisconsin, time with family, nostalgic memories, and a view of that embarrassing picture of me in the upstairs hallway. It also provides me with something while I am away from it, like right now at this moment.

Along with my family, 224 seems to be a huge part of the underlying psychological stability in my life.

It’s knowing I belong somewhere. And that no matter what happens to me, and what twists or turns my life will take, I will always have a place at that kitchen table. The very same one my parents got for $50 in Boston in the ‘90s. It’s a good table. It’s held up all these years. When I’ve been at the furthest reaches of those twists and turns, I somehow knew I could leave where I was in an instant and turn back to safety.

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Talking with my running group friends about their complicated relationships with home – and family – made me realize how much I’ve come to be grateful for my endlessly solid, immovable 224 base. And this is exactly what I told my mom while sitting at that very same kitchen table a few weeks back. To which she said, somewhat to my surprise, “Oh yes, we did that on purpose.”

I had probably known this on some level. But I hadn’t consciously thought about it too much. Of course, I think now, it all makes sense. My mom’s childhood was dotted with moves. Her family moved all over for her dad’s job and she never had that anchor that she later intentionally wanted to create for us.

She and my dad set out in search of their forever home when my oldest sister and I were too little to remember cycling through all those apartments. They found it just in time – a classic bungalow on a tree-lined street in the suburbs, with a park down the block. They settled there and called it home.

Where’s home to you?

¹ This was through WWOOFing, a program where people work on organic farms in exchange for room and board.

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