It’s so difficult to sum up “home” in a simple paragraph. Its definitions are an enigma, albeit a beautiful and contradictory one. People can share it, or it can be vastly different for different people. It can be transitory. It can be permanent. It can be a place. A person. A feeling. An object. A memory. A song. Home, in all cases, though, is synonymous with comfort and a degree of vulnerability. Each of these writers has bared their souls in sharing with you what home means to them, and I couldn’t be more proud of them. They each have shared a piece of themselves, allowing themselves to be known by others. What is perhaps most compelling about what they have written is that it shows us how, in sharing your “home” with someone, you can extend a bit of that comfort that your home brings you to others. From them, I learned that home, in addition to all of these other things, is a gift you can give to someone else. In reading their pieces, you also, for however long it lasts, can feel that you are “home.”
Daily Arts Writer Emmy Snyder can be reached at emmys@umich.edu.
Searching for my ‘Sunshine State’ by Daily Arts Writer Annabel Curran
In a collection of essays titled “Sunshine State,” Sarah Gerard weaves a provocative narrative, relating a connected series of events from her past with the drive and inquisitive nature of an investigative journalist, but with the subtle nostalgia that is so often evoked when retelling tales of home and childhood. At the root of each essay in “Sunshine State” is Gerard’s home state of Florida, or the Sunshine State, which shaped her formative years and memories in an idiosyncratic assortment of experiences that Gerard recounts so candidly.
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An ode to Gilbert, my childhood goldfish by Daily Arts Writer Hunter Bishop
Buried in the notes app on my phone, between shopping lists and reminders I have since forgotten the meaning of, is a quote from the author Sarah Dessen: “(Home is) not a place but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks.” Growing up, many of my moments happened in a singular place: My childhood home, where I was born and raised for the better part of 18 years. For me, the idea of home was tied to that house. With so much of my life spent in the same place, I couldn’t comprehend it not being my home.
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Your body is your home by Daily Arts Writer Kaya Ginsky
In college, my body started to feel like my home. Not in a confident way or just for the green eyes that were an exact mix of my father’s blue and mother’s brown, but for the marks on my skin that form a map of my hometown. I look in the mirror and remember my childhood. Maybe that is enough: not to feel perfectly comfortable in my skin, but to feel at home when I look at myself.
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Figuring out home with The Front Bottoms in ‘Vacation Town’ by Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri
After a complicated freshman year of virtual college, and a slightly less complicated sophomore year, I’ve found myself intrigued by the unique nostalgia folk punk band The Front Bottoms gives me, especially their song “Vacation Town.” I killed time and relieved stress in quarantine by going on drives and chasing the sunset while listening to The Front Bottoms’s hits and oldest songs — ballads of banal, yet painful, parts of life told via powerful, poetic lines in simple diction over somber guitar.
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Finding home at the piano bench by Daily Arts Writer Hannah Carapellotti
The piano that sits in my den right now is almost as old as I am. I still remember the first time I sat down at its bench — my little legs swinging in the air, unable to touch the ground beneath. My parents saw the musical talent in me before I ever did, and we bought the piano from a family friend — a music teacher — just before I started kindergarten. Its age is starting to show: The wood stain is fading, a few keys are chipped and its tune is degrading from the last time we had it fixed. Despite the countless years of lessons, playbooks and recitals, I don’t play it nearly as often as I should. It’s one of my biggest regrets.
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