I’ve created a home in DC. It’s filled to the brim with boy stuff now (and I include my husband here) – bikes and trucks and balls and (thankfully) books (often about bikes and trucks and balls). Before that I lived by myself for many years in various apartments and really didn’t call any place my "home." Still, at some point in my twenties I stopped calling that house in Long Island my home, as in “I’m going home to visit my parents.” In the last few weeks, though, visiting my dad alone in the house I grew up in, I’ve thought a lot about how it feels to be there. When I first walked in after my mom died, I had a visceral reaction like a punch to the gut. This is not that place that anchors me most to who I am, not anymore. Too much has changed. Maybe others have felt this way when their parents moved from their childhood home, if they had only one home, or maybe even when their parents remade their bedrooms into TV rooms (as mine did). But this is the first time I felt that kind of loss. But as the days passed and even more so when I came back the following weekend, it started to feel more like home than it has in all the years I’ve been away. I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect it’s in part because I’m discovering and remembering details that were always there but I had overlooked. How, for example, the floor creaks beneath the carpet in their bedroom; her necklaces hanging neatly from her closet door; her plants throughout the house – vibrant and alive; the sound of the AC wall units and the click of the kitchen cabinets closing; all the Renoir-themed chotchkis like notepads and night lights; the smell of eggs with lox and onions; her slippers. It’s always been a warm house to me, a real home, with muted colors and music on the stereo (classical guitar, perhaps), laughter, and interesting conversations. And even though there’s mostly silence now as my dad and I sit in the kitchen, letting our pain and sorrow come and go, I can still feel that warmth – her warmth. It’s a great comfort.