Reflections on Home

The young man seated next to me on the plane from Dulles asks if I'm headed home. We're about to land, and I know he's just making small talk, but I answer, "Not quite sure where home is anymore."

Is home the place I just left, the place where my whole family was gathered over the past few days? Or is home the place I am about to be met with bursting anticipation and a bouquet of wildflowers?

Is home the bedroom full of my school essays, childhood photographs and all the letters I have ever saved, or the one in which I built a loft with my landlord, the one I painted chartreuse, the one whose four walls free me?

I have lived in the same shared flat for 6 years, longer than my brothers have owned their respective homes - combined. And yet it feels temporary, a step towards I-don't-know-what. Its creative potential enchants me, but I sometimes long for retreat.

My professional persona is German. I never held a serious job, signed a lease or put money into savings anywhere but Deutschland.

I don't speak English or German as fluently as I would like. 

I vote in Virginia, but am out of touch with its politics. 

Referring to the German World Cup team, I slipped and said "we". But I feel most at home ensconced in an intellectual disdain for professional sports.

I feel at home on a bike, in whichever country. The flavors of ginger, maple, mint and garlic ground me, in whatever kitchen.

I feel at home in water or a warm embrace. 

I feel at home in the heavy Virginia humidity, but once every five years might be enough of its summer. 

Bonn welcomed me back with its long, crisp solstice twilight. But as I unpacked my clothes, I delighted in their sweet, damp scent: the smell of muggy mid-Atlantic afternoons before a thunderstorm.

A few of my German friends are so in tune with me I think of them as sisters. But only when I watch my nieces play does our whole family mosaic repeat itself in miniature. 

"I've lived in Germany for eight years, but I am from the States," I explain. 

He seems satisfied.

I wonder if I should have said, "I'm from the States, but I have lived in Germany for eight years," and I let the daydream take the upper hand.