As a kid growing up in and out of airports, one of my favorite things to do at the airport was collecting luggage tags from the check-in counter and making sure each of my family members bags had at least two, if not three, tags on them.
Delta used to always have fun little messages on theirs - "fly for business", "fly for fun", "fly me somewhere new". The fun part about flying with Delta was coming to the airport again, finding they had made a new one that I hadn't seen before, and figuring out whether it applied to me. I don't remember them all, but one has stuck with me ever since those elementary days.
"Fly me home."
With a house in Longmont, a 'permanent' address in Littleton, possessions scattered in five or more different places, a school in Greeley, relatives in Nebraska, family in Turkey, and with best friends literally scattered all over the world, HOME is a very difficult place to define.
"Fly me home"? Where is home?! And that dilemma was the joy of the luggage tag and why I still remember it above all the others. Anywhere the plane took me was home, either an old home or soon to become a new one. Even as a child I realized this, that the two places I grew up in - Longmont, Colorado and Istanbul, Turkey - were both home. Yet as I grow older and no longer live in either, I've started to learn that home is not necessarily one physical place.
It can be many places. Or not a physical place. Or one ultimate heavenly place.
Today I leave Colorado and head to Turkey to be home again for Christmas. I'm so excited to be with family and old friends again, and back in a place where I spent all of my high school years and childhood summers. I'll be there for two months before I head to South Korea for study abroad: a place I've never been to, but one I've always dreamed of visiting and hope to soon call home too.
My goal of this blog is to explore the concepts of home and what it means to have more than one. A Facebook status of mine from a year ago sums up my thoughts well:
