Tayla Mann
The idea of home to me is the people and the love I surround myself with. I could live in a big mansion but if I don’t have my friends and family and if there is no warmth to the house it is just a house, not a home. Home is more of a feeling of being not necessarily the place you are living in. For a house to become a home you can furnish it, and I mean this physically, spiritually and mentally. During her talk at Towson University (on April 7, 2021), Joyful Clemantine Wamariya mentioned having certain rugs or light fixtures that reminded her of her aunties’ and uncles’ homes back in Africa; she wanted to have bits and pieces of family and friends so her place could be considered a home. This reminds me of a conversation I had with my roommates on the insides of peoples’ homes. So there is a friend who lives in a home that can be described as a staged house. Currently where I live, my roommates compared my home to a place that looks lived in, more of a home. I mention this because no homes look exactly the same and may never but people can pull from other places to make it their own safe sanctuary and that they call home. Homes can have different components and may not be a place that we imagine a home to be. When Joyful, her sister Claire, and her niece were living in tents at the camps, they may not have considered those places as homes, but for that time being it was, because that was where her family was. As long as you have family and love you can push through and persevere and call where ever you are, your home.
You can have multiple homes. Personally, any home my extended families live in, I consider my home because of the memories associated with the place. A person considers a place a home because of the connection they have with the place. The apartment that my family and I lived in back in Brooklyn will always be my home because that’s where I spent my first childhood years and made so many wonderful and not so wonderful memories. That is life, there are going to be ups and downs, so there will be ups and downs associated with homes as well. But the beauty is you decide what is home.