I grew up in Seattle.
If someone asks me where I’m from, Seattle is still usually the answer. I know those streets. I remember places that aren’t there anymore. There are parts of that city that will probably always feel familiar to me.
But I’ve lived in Eugene since 1996.
At some point, without anyone bothering to notify me, Eugene became home.
I’m not exactly sure when that happened, and it raises the question: When does a place become home?
There wasn’t a ceremony. I didn’t wake up one morning, stand out on the back deck and yell, “I am an Oregonian now!”
It happened through repetition. Work. Marriage. Raising our boys. Grocery stores. Doctors. Favorite roads. Photography. Friends. Knowing shortcuts. Recognizing people. Having memories attached to otherwise meaningless intersections.
Maybe home begins when you stop needing Google Maps. Although given my sense of direction, that standard may leave me permanently homeless.
I’ve lived in several physical homes. Each one was more than just an address. A house is surprisingly easy to define. Walls. Roof. Plumbing. Rent. A collection of shit you apparently thought was important enough to move from the last house.
Home is harder.
For thirty-two years, home was something Mel and I built together. Not the building. The life inside it.
Our boys. Meals. Arguments. Holidays. Laundry. Laughter. Bills. Things breaking at exactly the wrong fucking time. All the completely ordinary pieces that don’t seem important while they’re happening.
Until they are.
One of the strange things I’ve had to learn is that home can survive change and still become something different. The address doesn’t change. The key still fits. The coffee maker is still where I left it.
And somehow the meaning of the place changes anyway.
When my boys were little, I thought my job was to provide them with a home. Keep a roof over their heads. Food in the refrigerator. Heat. Safety. All the obvious Dad shit.
Looking back, I wonder how much of home had absolutely nothing to do with the roof.
I’ve also discovered that home can occasionally show up somewhere that isn’t home at all.
I’ve felt it sitting beside a campfire with my girl while sleeping on a futon apparently manufactured from compressed concrete. Nothing about that setup should have felt like home. And somehow part of it did.
We’re building our own collection of ordinary things. Jokes. Conversations. Drives. Meals. Her hand finding mine. The little routines that start developing before either person realizes they’re routines.
Maybe that’s how home gets built. Not all at once. Piece by piece.
I’ve photographed enough horse people to know that home isn’t necessarily where the bed is.
Sometimes it’s a barn. There are people who walk into a barn, smell hay, manure and horse sweat and visibly relax. Which is objectively fucking weird.
And yet, I completely understand it.
Ham radio people can apparently create home anywhere they can hang enough wire in a tree.
Apparently I can create home in a minivan as long as I bring enough technology and don’t bring that fucking futon.
Maybe home is where I stop feeling like I need to be somewhere else.
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about what’s next. The next job. The next project. The next trip. The next problem. The next version of myself.
But there are moments now when I’m sitting somewhere—with my boys, with my girl, behind a camera, around a campfire, sometimes completely by myself—and I don’t particularly want to be anywhere else.
I’m starting to think that’s one of the ways I recognize home.
Maybe part of this whole evolution thing has been learning how to feel at home with myself. That’s taken considerably longer than learning the streets of Eugene.
I grew up in Seattle. I’ve lived in Eugene for thirty years. I’ve lived in houses that became homes and watched home change while the address stayed exactly the same. I’ve found pieces of it in kitchens, barns, campsites, behind a camera, with my boys and sitting beside someone whose hand has somehow become very familiar in mine.
I’m not sure home is something I can put an address on anymore. Maybe it’s simpler than that.
Maybe home is wherever I can look around for a minute and realize there isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.
Sometimes that’s my house. Sometimes it’s somewhere completely unexpected.
And apparently sometimes it’s a campsite with a really shitty fucking futon.