A Cradle of Civilization: The Home

The routine of home offers respite from the cares and worries of the world. Aleksandra Suzi/Shutterstock

We Americans have long celebrated the idea of home. Think of Dorothy clicking her heels together in “The Wizard of Oz” while saying the magic incantation that will return her to Kansas: “There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!” Remember that line from the song “Home, Sweet Home”: “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!”

We may romanticize home, but meanwhile, we move from one place to another more than almost any other people in the world. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the average American changes residences about 12 times during his lifetime. I counted up the times I’ve picked up stakes and came up with 21 relocations.

Home Made

Despite all of this shuffling about, we create a home, in part, with the things we carry with us. We may move from an apartment in Manhattan to a townhouse in Phoenix, but we begin to make that empty and alien space into a home as soon as we unload our furniture and belongings from the moving van. The breakfront that once belonged to a great-grandmother, a bookshelf built by an uncle, an old sofa that’s just as comfortable as ever: They transform the new and the strange into the familiar.