All the Places I Call Home

I have traveled the world and found home all over. My old house in Missouri was a truly special home to me. It was quite big, and we had a beautiful, shining pond in our grand backyard. I loved my home there, but I knew it wasn’t forever. I find home way out West in my Grandma’s house. I go there almost every Christmas, and the parts that make it home are the house itself, but also something more. The sound. The smell. The people. The memories. I love it there, and I often wish to be back there with all my close family. Two thousand miles east of Grandma’s is my nana’s house, with its familiar pull-out couch, my favorite bed in the whole house. It’s where I’ve celebrated Halloween for most of my life. It has a trampoline in the backyard, where I learned to do a front flip, and told tremendous tales in the games my cousins and I played. I love that place. More than just grandparents’ houses, I can call so many places home. Three years ago we left our house and everything we knew to travel the world. We went to twenty-seven countries together, from Switzerland to Japan to South Africa. I love all these places, but after years of hopping from country to country, we needed to settle down. One day my parents took my brothers and me to a park and showed us a picture of the house that would become our forever home. For the first time in my life, I have my own room! Ever since then we’ve lived happily in our new home. To me, a home could be anything in the world, anywhere in the world, as long as it has that special feeling that makes it yours.