The best part of any trip, for me, is coming home. The places I visited may have been exotic, the people fascinating, and the landscape breathtaking, but nothing compares with the moment I step over the threshold and am safe in my own home.  While some may shun the predictable, the comfortable and the familiar- longing for adventure and novelty- I relish that transition from the chilly outside world into the unassuming townhouse I have called home for twenty years. Though I may be the dullest person on the planet, I covet my small pleasures and comforting routines.

When I have to leave home for time, whether for business or pleasure, it feels as if I am physically wrenching myself away. And on my return, it seems that  as I get closer to home, it actually exerts a gravitational pull, so strong, that I can feel it tugging at me as we exit I 95 and head toward my development,  my street, my house. There are, apparently, others who share this love affair with “home.” I wonder if this is a 60s thing or if it’s just me?

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.– Jane Austen

“Where we love is home–home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes

” A house can have integrity, just like a person.” –Ayn Rand

“The home is the center and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.” –Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“By home, we mean a place in which the mind can settle…a refuge to which we flee in the expectation of finding those calm pleasures, those soothing kindnesses which are the sweetness of life.”–James Bean

“Home is the place where you feel happy.” –Salma

“The sun at home warms better than the sun elsewhere.”–Albania proverb

“Home is where one starts from.” –T.S. Eliot

“Even a cat is a lion in her own lair.”–Indian Proverb

“The home is not the one stable place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.” –Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Home is where the books are.” –Richart Burton

“To feel at home, stay at home.”–Clifton Fadiman

“It’s nice to return home each day to something intensely personal.” –Stanley Barrows

Be it ever so humble...

Categories: observations