Somewhere to come home to

I live in a nice house, in a nice, quiet area, with good neighbours and excellent landlords. It's a luxurious house, really, by my standards. It's bigger and newer and prettier than I need (though really not well designed). But it's not a home.

Home is a place where the neighbourhood has it's own culture of integration, a community where people care to know you and look out for you.

Home is a place where friends and neighbours drop in for a cuppa when they're passing, or drop off some garden herbs or home-baked treats.

Home is a place that nourishes the soul as well as sheltering the body, a place warm with shared laughter and dreams, watered by tears wept with company.

Home is where you come to visit, and I feed us and we laugh and hug and dream of bigger futures and it doesn't matter if the paint's peeling or the door is cracked and I can hang my pictures on the walls and wander through the garden that's just a little over-grown and rambling in an enchanted kind of way. It's the place where the light slides in all golden and buttery, burnished like a well-loved soul, and the outside tries to follow it to feed on the joy that flourishes inside.

I want a home to go to.