A Personal Sense of Home

To me, the word "home" evokes a sense of comfort, nostalgia, and security. In the ideal sense of the word, home is someplace to go to gain reassurance and feel emotionally at ease. A home is different than just a house; home has abstract memories and feelings that cannot easily be described. I grew up in Henderson, Nevada, and when I think of home the first thing that comes to my mind is warmth. Nevada is very dry and hot, which is different than Pullman or my current place of residence in Spokane, Washington. Heat changes the scenery, the feel, and look of a place. People interact differently in heat, a lot of time is spent at lakes and parks. The colors are different, they are more warm and inviting due to the desert atmosphere.

In this abstract representation of home, I focused on the natural aspects. As a child everything seems a lot bigger in proportion, hence the big cacti as the focal point. The sun stands out in the west, as I lived in the desert southwest. The flowers in the bottom corner represent a type of flower called Lantanas that my mother grew in the front and back yards. I never knew how she did it because not much grows in the desert but she managed to grow them all year long. My house is obviously the most realistic representation, and when I think of my house I think of big windows letting all the light into my front living room. In my mind my home was split into two places, the majority of my time was spent in the warmth Henderson, but the other part of my memories are where my aunt lives in McCall, Idaho. 

McCall is pretty centrally located in Idaho, and it holds a completely different set of memories for me than Henderson does. McCall is tucked away in the mountains, and specifically where my aunt lives little streams and tributaries criss-cross over farmlands and fresh alfalfa fields. Where heat is the adjective I think of with Henderson, smell is the word I think of most in reference to my aunt's house. She owns horses and some of my favorite memories from childhood involve feeding the horses or playing in the wheat fields surrounding their barn. Walking into the feeding shed it always smelled like alfalfa, which is one of my favorite smells in the world.

This is one of my favorite childhood photos, outside the wheat fields in the grass after I had been playing outside for a while. I loved that feeling of freedom I got when running around the fields with wheat almost as tall as I was.