Once the leaves fall from the vine the nests built by several birds over the spring and summer are revealed. I don’t know which birds make these particular nests but I do know a blackbird is one of the most likely candidates.
Seeing this nest again made me think about the concept of “home”. What makes a place a “home”? What makes the place where you live “home”?
I remember when I was a GP in a small village in South West Scotland that I was surprised how some young adults had never travelled as far as Glasgow, the big city, less than an hour away by train, bus or car. I also remember how loyal many patients in Portobello were to their town, and didn’t really see themselves as citizens of Edinburgh….same thing in Leith, where people even call themselves “Leithers”. It seems wherever I go I find people who call this particular place “home” and are extremely resistant to ever living anywhere else.
My “home” town was Stirling. That’s where I was born and brought up. But the other places I lived over the last forty years or so have also felt like “home”. I feel “at home” here in this small village south of Cognac in South West France now.
It seems we are able to attach to pretty much anywhere. Is that the definition of “home”? The place we are “attached to”? The place where “we belong”? But isn’t it also true for many of us who have lived in several different places that we have a sense of “home” in many of them? “Home” it seems to me is not a singular, exclusive concept. We can feel at home in the place where we are living now, and we can still have that sense of having left a “home” once we move away from here.
What makes “home” for you?
Heroes Not Zombies 
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