What is home? Glimpses of refuge from 19 Monitor writers.
HOME IS A ROOM I’ve prepared in my heart to store my most prized memories. There, I recall the beautiful orange chiffon-and-velvet dress Mrs. Porter, a family friend, gave me when I was 5 years old. It holds the joyous feeling I experienced when I held my sons for the first time.
It preserves the moment when my mother, who didn’t have the educational opportunities I had, said my college graduation was an “auspicious” occasion and I had to look up the word. Home is where I’m humbled and celebrated.
What I like about my tiny home is its mobility. It also has a unique ability to expand as needed to store new joys, take in new friendships, and offer peace and calm on days that are a series of unexpected events.
I go home as often as I can because it brings me back to my true north.
– Maisie Sparks is the author of “Holy Shakespeare!” and other works.
Wartime
“HOME” IS NOT a word I would have applied to the aged house, with its peeling layers of blue paint and with multiple signs of the war that ravaged the front-line hamlet of Prudyanka, north of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
This is where Ukrainian forces drew the line on the Russian advance in May 2022, halting it for half a year at a high cost of destruction to houses and lives. Without running water or electricity, and with many houses damaged beyond immediate repair, most residents had fled the ruins.
But not Tetyana Tokar, an octogenarian with a scrap-of-cloth headscarf. I found her receiving hot soup and fresh bread from the relief agency World Central Kitchen, as it made a food drop-off.
Ms. Tokar pointed to the rifle of my Ukrainian military escort and joked, “You should point it here,” motioning toward her head with a laugh, as if her decision to stay in the wrecked hamlet was crazy.
Winter was looming with frigid conditions, and Russia had been targeting electrical substations to keep Ukrainians cold.
Behind the house, Ms. Tokar’s 95-year-old aunt, Ksenia Yehorova, tended a fire to heat soup in a blackened pot and hacked pieces of wood from a rain-soaked woodpile.
I was impressed by their fortitude. Wrapped in multiple layers to ward off the cold, these women chose the manifest hardships of home over the uncertainties of someplace else.
“It’s very cold; we live like we are on the street,” Ms. Tokar said. “But my aunt doesn’t want to go.”
– Scott Peterson is the Monitor’s senior Middle East correspondent.
WE STARED AT THE STAIRS, not recognizing what they would mean to us for the rest of our lives. Rising from rubble through pockmarked concrete walls, they were glittery and crunchy with broken glass. We were reporting in Grozny, Chechnya, during a cease-fire in the brutal war between Russia and breakaway rebels in the summer of 1996. We’d been offered ostensibly safe quarters in a 10th-floor apartment of a bombed-out high-rise.
It was the first and only time my husband and I went on a reporting assignment together.
We’d had long days
