Home.

When I was a boy I knew what the word "Home" meant. It was a house in which I and my family lived. Through the course of my adult life I have since lived in approximately fifteen different places in 22 years, four cities in three states. During my life I have so far visited twelve countries for periods longer than a week, and several more for shorter periods. The house in which I am presently I have lived in for less than a year. In a sense the definition of home is the same, in that when I say I going home I am going to the house in which I live with what essentially consists of my family, in my wife. On the other hand this constant migration has changed the definition as well.

For all the nineties when I talked about home I meant England. It was where I was from, it was what I knew, it was the place that was instinctive for me. Home was a place that I had left, but my belief was that it would always be there as home. The thought was that thirty years later I could walk into a country pub and feel comfortable, that I fit, that I was English. Whenever I would visit upon seeing the green of the hedges and fields through both the scratched portal of the airplane's window and the grey haze of fog and cloud a feeling would come, both sad and proud, a swelling in my breast for my homeland.

However, as the years deepened and my returns continued it became apparent that my accent had changed to such a degree that the English thought I was an American. There is nothing so certain an identification of a person in people's eyes as their accent. Although I thought of my home as England, the English thought of me as a foreigner. As nine years passed in Michigan, even with my accent changed beyond recognition in my homeland I was still continually asked, "Where are you from?" A more perfect way to ensure that you know that you are not at home than this question I have yet to meet.

So, where I lived I was asked where I was from, and when I was where I was from the natives were certain I was from somewhere else. Eventually I decided to move to Portland, Oregon, and reached some sort of compromise. For a start, a majority of the people living in Portland are from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is simply a different part of Oregon. Different parts of Oregon are indeed, very different from Portland. The other part of Portland that helped a compromise was that the values of the people there were very much akin to mine. A belief in helping people, of peace, of thinking and talking, about drinking beer. A collegial atmosphere to a very large extent. The weather was also very familiar to me, lots of grey days, green vegetation, the familiarity of street lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.

However, during the last couple of years in Portland I felt a tingle to move on. There was the feeling of having done Portland, having exhausted what it could give me. There was a feeling of just doing the same things over and over. This is one of the several reasons for the move to Texas, although far from being the most important one. However, I think it may well be an important component of what makes up home, adequate repetition until there is nothing new to you in a place.

Christina and I just returned from a trip to a foreign country in which I felt more at home than in the place that I left. While the local accents on the Dingle Peninsular where often nearly unintelligible the countryside, the pure air, the mannerisms of the country people, all felt easier to me than in the place I presently live. So much so that on our flight home I resolved to treat Spring, TX as a vacation spot we were flying into to spend a few weeks in tropical sunshine, and to a large extent this has worked and it is what I feel. I feel like a tourist in my home.

So what is home? I think there are rings of home. There is a place that you own, that you can exclude people from, in which you can hide and arrange things to your satisfaction. To an extent home is the place where you have control over your environment. The next step is that the area is familiar to you to the point beyond thinking. Home is the area within which you can operate on autopilot, the antithesis of foreign. Then there is the home that comes from being part of a group, being part of a culture with shared values, experiences and understanding. This home comes when you don't censor your speech because you aren't worried about offending people. To an extent it's the group of people with whom you can share the ridiculing of others as an acceptable activity. For me, making fun of Sarah Palin denotes a certain amount of home.

Our vacation to Dingle solidified something for Christina and I. Our plan has failed. Texas is not where we want to be, and therefore we must leave here. It can never be home because the very act of surviving here is not natural to us. We share almost nothing with people who live here, even those who are pleasant and friendly and do no harm. It is impossible for Texas to be home in the fuller sense of the word. While on vacation in Ireland we were asked repeatedly where we were from, and both of us found it very hard to say we were from Texas.

So we need to find a place where we can have our own house in which we can hide securely, we need a form of living that feels natural for us, we need sunshine to ward off depression, and we need the people to be like us. We need to find a home, and I'm a bit sad and disappointed in myself that I seem to need the last criterion, that of people somewhat similar to myself.