The Earth is round...you'll always end up back where you started.

People seem to have this uncanny ability to move to a new place and "start fresh". Something about the different scenery, lifestyle, house, whatever, seems to make a bad situation disappear, or at least make it easier to move on.

But where is home exactly? Where your original family is? Where you begin your own family? Where your roots began or where you plant new roots? Which? I think your home is always where you came from, where you began, where the people you feel connected to are. I can't think of a word in English to describe it....but in German it's called gemütlichkeit. It's not necessarily a place...just an untranslatable well-being of everything that's happened in your life, good and bad...memories of times gone by. Because we all start and end with family, and family isn't just blood. It's everyone you love....friends, pets, boyfriends and girlfriends. And that's where home is. Where all that is. Your problems will always be your problems, but the beautiful thing is, so will your family. And you can't run away from that. Ever.

I've lived in several places in my life and when you do that, you can't find where you come from on a map. All those places you lived are just that: places. You don't come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memories. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we all are. Almost not born at every turn. It's amazing. Without a place, events and family slow tumbling though time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a chance meeting of two people. A smile. Love. Unlikely, but it still happened. One in a million.

Tell the story, gather the events, and repeat the good ones without fear of repeating the failures your roots experience. You learned. Repeat the goodness, pattern is a matter of keeping happiness alive. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men....repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or the events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.