You can buy a house but not a home, the blather of realtors notwithstanding.
True. A home is constructed out of memories. It's a place where we have lingered for a while, and dwelt.
Eventually, everything in it is layered in familiarity. It takes a special effort to see it as raw space.
But it's more than memories or familiarity. When we've worked at the same place for several years, it can be quite familiar to us and we can have many memories -- even fond ones -- of things that have happened there. Yet we still speak, correctly, of going home at the end of the day.
It's not the presence of family, or people who live alone could never be at home. But they are.
I've been meaning to write something about this for a long time, but I've never gotten around to it. The total conflation of 'home' with 'house' strikes me as ridiculous; home-as-house is a useful concept, but there's another sense that's often forgotten: home is the place where one feels at home -- a community tied to a place, a place necessarily (or at least hopefully!) larger than one house.
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