My homes....

Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop today asked you to describe everywhere you have called “home”. I’m actually a bit excited to write this as I have had several homes through the years, some good, some bad, and some just plain old ugly. Enjoy.
1. The family homestead. I grew up in the same house for all 18 years of my life before college came around. Actually, I may have lived somewhere before that, but I don’t remember it, so for all intents and purposes this is it. It was an adorable little split level on a nice half acre complete with pool and giant backyard in a neighborhood that was teeming with kids in a nice, quiet residential town. It was the perfect place to grow up and neighborhood games of Capture the flag and movie watching/fort building were frequent. Loved this place…couldn’t have asked for a better place to grow up.

2. Springfield College. I consider this place a home, despite the fact that it was a school. I met some fantastic, lifelong friends at SC and learned a lot about who I was as a person. Plus, college was a lot of fun…

3. The little white Cape. I lived here for the summer after college. My family was in the process of building a new house and had already sold the old homestead so this was an interim rental. It was very tiny and having to house a grownup family of 5 was challenge. I went back to sharing a room with my sister and sharing one bathroom with my whole family (yikes!). As trying as this was sometimes, it made me realize that it doesn’t really matter what your living situation is, all that matters is that your family is there…home is where the heart is.

4. Our first apartment. After the little white cape, I picked up all my belonging and moved to another state…followed a boy. It’s okay though because the boy became hubby. Our first apartment was just under 800 sq.ft. in an apartment complex with no private outdoor area. Let me tell you…if you want to know if you can live with someone and apartment that size will tell you! We learned a lot about each other that year, including the fact that we have very different taste in TV shows. After a lovely little debacle there with the complex staff accusing us of littering their parking lot with cigarette butts (we don’t smoke) and then starting to clean out our apartment before we had moved out we went to the winner of all of our homes….

5. Granite St. ugh. This was an old multifamily home with tons of character. Decorative wood trim, SUPER high ceilings and 3 bedrooms. It was about twice the size of our old apartment and we were in heaven. Or so we thought. It was in the ghetto and we didn’t really realize it. We had a housemate who didn’t work and I think sold drugs and/or her body (which is a disturbing though), frequent fights in the street, lots of police activity, etc. We lasted about a year and fled….we learned that a cool apartment wasn’t worth our sanity.

6. Apartment #3….nice two family home with our landlords, a young couple about our age, living upstairs. We loved this place! We actually still talk to our landlords to this day. This place made us realize that the people make all the difference in the world about your residence choices.

7. Apartment #4….the big move back to CT. I’m getting tired of describing our apartments.

8. Finally….the house! We bought our first house back in October and things have really come full circle. We’re back in the town that we both grew up in, in a cute little neighborhood with some friendly people. It is so nice to finally have a place to call our own and we have spent lots of time getting it setup to our liking. I can’t wait until spring rolls around and we can spruce up the exterior.


I realize that that’s a laundry list of homes and the majority of them took place over a span of 5 years. We moved a lot. The important part was that hubby was with me and made each place really feel like home. In addition, we met so many wonderful people along the way that all of those places still feel like home. Guess home really is where the heart is….and sometimes that is more than one place.