
– Mom, what is the meaning of the word “home”? – my daughter asked while doing her first grade English homework.
– “Hogar” in English is home, HOME. – I answered with a hint of impatience.
More than thirty years have passed since that moment, and it is only today when I realized that my daughter’s question – What is the meaning hogar/home? – regardless of the language, is not as obvious as I thought then.
Many of us have left our homeland, we have seen our parents’ houses disappear and we have had to reinvent our homes scattered around the world. Eleanor Catton, a New Zealand writer born in Canada, puts it very well:
“If home cannot be where, one is from, it is what one makes of the place where one goes”.
And it is not that easy.
Anyway, I think I owe my daughter an apology thirty years later. My impatience as a young mother did not allow me to see that the definition of home carries great depth.
So, wrapped in my nostalgia and reflections, Phillip arrived.
Phillip is a majestic pheasant who makes my house his nest in the freezing winter.
I don’t know how he remembers my address every year, but in the canopy of my window he finds his shelter and his refuge, his safe place, his home.
I once read that home is a place you can always return to.
“Home is not where you were born,
home is where all your attempts to escape,
stop”
Naguid Mahfouz

Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com