What Makes a Home?

Ansley Dauenhauer
11 minutes ago
2 min read

A Quote, a Question, and a Quirk

Ansley Dauenhauer theloftyquill.com August 17, 2026

A Borrowed Voice

Home is a holy thing.

Emily Dickinson

A Curious Inquiry

Where do you feel most at home?

To prime your pump:

When you close your eyes and picture “home”, what do you see?

What makes it “home” to you—the things, the place, the people, the memories, or something else entirely?

Maybe you don’t picture a house . . . is there another place that is your “home”?

A Small Moment

I love Emily Dickinson’s quote, because home truly should be a holy place, the place you feel most like yourself. I did a visualization recently where we were instructed to visualize the place we felt the most relaxed. We weren’t supposed to think much about it, just close our eyes and be there, and then register where that place was. When I “looked around” in my visualization, I realized I was in our living room in our small New York apartment. I was sitting on the sofa, the sun streaming through the windows onto the nape of my neck. It was quiet— I think our daughter was probably at school and her younger brother was taking his nap. The dog, a twelve-year-old, four-and-a-half-pound chihuahua-rat terrier mix, was curled up in my lap. I guess I had gone back not only to a place where I felt most at home but also a time in my life.

As I edited an essay the other day, the author captured precisely how I felt about New York. “I’d been gone from [this city] for fifteen years,” the author wrote, “but [this city] still felt like home,” and the rest of the essay explained why. Like the author in her particular city, we have been gone from New York far longer than we lived there, but something about that time in my life and the environs resonated deep in my soul.

I’d have to write an essay to parse why New York burrowed so thoroughly into my bones, but I think it’s far more than just the place. It was the people, the adventures, the freedoms the city offered, and the growing and learning I did while I was there. The concept of home is the much more than the sum of the parts, and something about the combination of the time and all the parts made East 77th St. fully my home.