laid a great deal of store by 'home' - the brick and mortar structure she called home. As a result, when she had to be shifted to an apartment close to where medical facilities would be available, she was always pining for home---this place where my brother had brought her and which had all of her familiar things around was still not home enough--she needed the familiar things to be in the brick structure called home. What grief there was about it...My mother has passed on, but ever since then I have totally rejected this concept of pinning every hope and every dream and every thought on a brick and cement home. I felt good..but I knew I was going against the conventional. But them, this was reinforced while reading Olivia Goldsmith's 'Insiders', where an inmate, a wonderful lady who was in jail for life, decides to sell her home. In her words: 'I had clung to the idea of the house for many years. I my head I redid the perennial beds, thought about painting the hallway.......'. Through the years she realized that her life was where she was and that its quality was far more important. Voicing her wish to sell her home, she felt, was the most liberating moment she had known in many years.
And that's it.....clinging on to a brick-and-mortar home is limiting, and painful not only for yourself but to the family as well....
I like the 'home is where you hang your hat' concept better.......home is just where you are and what you make of it without hanging on to it or drawing your identity from it....