I feel like this is one of those questions that I'll never quite get my head around. Home should be the flat I inhabit with my husband - but it's never felt like anything less than transitional - a temporary place to store our belongings and go to sleep at night. Four years from our completion date, the only concession we have made towards decorating is putting up a shelf and hanging some art on the walls. It would never occur to me to paint, to put my stamp on it. We bought it with a mind towards leaving before we'd even stepped over the threshold.
London leans a little towards home. I'm technically a Londoner by birth, but certainly not by nature -I still marvel at the tourist traps and there's something about the sunlight glinting off the Thames that always stops me in my tracks while I snap a quick photo. London is full of wonder - flying into London City airport, skimming the river; darting around back streets off Covent Garden; dreaming of houses in Bloomsbury; dawdling around Kings Cross, pretending to wait for the Hogwarts Express. London is my work stomping ground, the place where I started to unfurl my wings, where it feels like there's something exciting waiting for me around every corner. London is busy and bustling and when you're with the right people, it's such fun - but a part of me always remembers lonely lunch breaks, hunched over a table for one in a Camden Pret, feeling like the only soul in the city without a friend. London is wonderful on a temporary basis, if I invest the right amount of energy, just enough to get by without feeling like it's chewing me up, preparing to spit me out. It must be city life - but I've always been a country girl at heart.
Canterbury felt like the happy medium between the villages of my childhood and the cities I yearned for as a teenager. Canterbury still feels like home to me - albeit viewed through a nostalgic lens. I fell for Canterbury a long time ago, when Cafe Nero was still an old-fashioned tearoom leaning haphazardly over the street below; so spending three years at university on the hill with the cathedral shining in the valley was the culmination of a decade of love for the town. I know my retrospective view is somewhat rose-tinted - I loved academia, made some lifelong friends, didn't have to work, and met my husband whilst in Canterbury, all of which sets a pretty high standard for anywhere else to follow on. But I love the city nonetheless, as my very first home away from home.
So let's talk about home.
So let's talk about home.
Home for me starts when the plane begins its descent, when rolling green fields dotted with villages turn into a city in a matter of seconds. This is usually the point when my sense of relief is so overwhelming that tears spring to my eyes, when a pain I didn't realise I felt begins to ease. I try to make sure I'm listening to the right song when the descent begins, so the lyrics "now I'm coming home" sing out at exactly the right moment.
If I'm on the right side of the plane I'll see the rooftops of my secondary school peek out from behind the park where my friends and I hid on lunch breaks. We'll skim the square which holds the yearly Christmas market, full of greasy potato cakes, and sweet cinnamon-y churros to distract us from our freezing feet. We'll dart over the city which sprawls across a rock, sliced by a valley falling away below, a city you can walk around in forty minutes, a city which changes endlessly but still stays the same. In the distance the river yawns and stretches its way out to the valley I call home.
Home is where the wheat fields bend softly in the breeze, rippling to the trees which line the river, where the cherries drop before we can catch them, where the roads still bear the marks of the cows when they used to sway past our house of an evening, docile as they made their way back to the farms. Where the familiar church bells chime at dawn to remind you of the day stretching out ahead; where the silence is only occasionally broken by the odd boy racer, or the gentle hum of the main road beyond the rooftops. Trees line the horizon no matter which direction you turn, a vibrant green in the summer, a glowing gold in the autumn.
Home is where I chipped my tooth while running in socks across tiled floors; where our puppy howled all night in an echoing bathroom; where next door's rooster insisted on waking us all in the early hours with his screeching call; where I fell out the cherry blossom tree during a garden party. Home is where half my family still lives, where my dog curls up in sunlight streaming through the shutters, where the house groans and creaks in the wind, exactly as it did twenty years ago.
Home is where I chipped my tooth while running in socks across tiled floors; where our puppy howled all night in an echoing bathroom; where next door's rooster insisted on waking us all in the early hours with his screeching call; where I fell out the cherry blossom tree during a garden party. Home is where half my family still lives, where my dog curls up in sunlight streaming through the shutters, where the house groans and creaks in the wind, exactly as it did twenty years ago.
Home is probably a feeling, more than a place; a memory, more than a house. But all I know is, for me, Luxembourg is home, and always will be.
