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My boss from my old corporate job recently responded to an e-mail of mine and asked, “So where is home for you these days?” I can only imagine she was prompted to ask since I’ve been out of Chicago since last year, my sisters and their respective husbands live in Southern California and because my parents have moved from Rhode Island to Seattle in the last month. And while my immediate internal response was, “Well all my ‘stuff’ is in Chicago so it must be Chicago,” I really began to ponder the question, ‘What is home?’ I mean, to be honest, I feel completely at home here in Bull Savannah after only seven months.

Since heading to the Midwest in 1993 I have always “gone home for Christmas,” meaning I have gone back to New England, the place where I spent the second half of my formative years. My mother is always happy to contend, quite emphatically, that wherever she and my father live, that is home. But for as much as I love Seattle it is not home and I would be much more comfortable calling New England home than the Pacific Northwest. But at the same time, people around here keep asking me if I’m going home and I always tell them, “Yes. I have an entire life waiting for me in Chicago.”

So which one is home?

I once heard the comedian George Carlin go into a rant around the word ‘homeless.’ His schtick was that homeless people are not really homeless, they are ‘houseless,’ and while anyone can have a house, it takes a certain intangible quality to make a home. I can only guess said intangible quality comprises people, memories, familiarity with surroundings and the like; that magical place where “everybody knows your name.” So what happens when you are fortunate enough to have more than one place fit that description? Can a person have multiple ‘homes?’ It’s kind of like the moniker of “Best Friend.” In my opinion there is a superlative quality to those distinctions and a person can really only have one.

I may have to get back to you on this. I head back to Chicago in little less than a month and I may have more clarity then.