I was grumbling to my sixth grader about how my mom was all excited that I had visited Arizona, my home state. “Some home state! I was born there, sure, but I’m not FROM there. I’m a military brat. I’m not FROM anywhere. I don’t have a Home,” I said.

“Oh, I’ve always had a Home,” Sam said, looking out the window.

I asked my sixth grader, “What are you talking about? You’re 12-years-old. You’ve had like 10 addresses so far. Where are you thinking is a home-with-a-capital-H Home?”

“I mean here,” he said, gesturing at the freeway. “You know, where WE are.” That threw me. When I was in sixth grade, I was very aware that I had places I could call home, but I didn’t have that looming, all encompassing “Home” that my parents had grown up with.

Neither one of them had traveled more than 50 miles from home until my dad joined the Air Force. When my mom came “Home” she sat in the same pew at the same church where she was baptized and received her First Holy Communion and walked down the aisle as a bride. When my dad came home, the same bits of gravel popped up on the car.
 
Those two had Home. My Ohio cousins had Home. The kids in my class whose grandparents showed up at the school play — they all had Home as a place you could plot on a map. As a smell. As a taste. As a season. I didn’t. I knew I didn’t. It’s kind of a badge of honor for military brats.

So why doesn’t my kid miss that, too?  Believe me, it is not some magic I am performing in my house. Home to my kid is the place you have to unload the dishwasher.
 
Instead this shift in his perception could be the reflection of a real change in our society. The Department of Defense claims that the average military family moves every two-and-a-half years. That’s about what it was when I was a kid — more for Army brats, less for the Air Force. That made us weird back in the day.
 
But now we are a lot more like the average American family. According to the 2000 census, 20 percent of Americans moved within the previous 15 months. Other surveys say that half of all Americans move every five years. Sam is a lot more like the kids in his class than he is different from them.
 
Perhaps more importantly, he is more like his parents. Neither of us are connected to a place the way our parents or grandparents were connected. We will not return to our home state when we retire, we will simply end up somewhere and coax a home from that place.
 
In one way, I think it is terribly sad, worrisome to let go of place as one of the things holding us to the earth.
 
But in another way I am so heartened. Here is my child who finds home to be a place made by the pure presence of five little people. Home is the scent of Chicken Cacciatore bubbling in a blue pot. Home is eating in the dining room and putting away your own laundry. Home is going to church on Sunday night and our thousand holiday rituals.

For him, home is what my mother and father made and remade so over all those years, finally free of geography. Home is where WE are. Which is what my mother has been telling me all along.