Home is many things to many people. For some, it is a place, for others a person. It may be a time or even, if we are lucky, simply our own self. Home is any and all of these things but also something more. Home is wherever, whenever and with whomever we feel a sense of our soul settling. It is a steady comfort, a gentle joy wrapped in safety and belonging. It is when the mundane loses its mundanity and reveals instead the beauty of simple pleasures.

I have moved house a lot in my adult life. On eight separate occasions I have packed up my belongings and shipped them from one address to the next. I have been fortunate to live in many happy homes. Some I’ve shared with family, some with friends, one with strangers and one I had all to myself. Home is important to me and, being someone who does not enjoy change, every move has brought with it some apprehension and anxiety along with the excitement. Every new place has required some time for it to feel like home. Until this one.

My soul settled into this home before the first box of our belongings had even made it through the door. Despite an extraordinarily stressful moving day – including the very real possibility that we would not have been able to move in that day at all – I have felt not a jot of anxiety. This house feels like it has been waiting for us.

As we begin the steady process of making it our own, delighting in choosing paint colours and picking fabric samples and trying to figure out where on earth we’re going to put all the books, I’m reminded in every moment how very fortunate we are. And I’m finding new pleasures every day in this space. In the rumbling of trains as they pass nearby. In the sound of rain on our lovely garden through the open window. In the quiet of the cul-de-sac at night and the walk down the tree lined street in the freshness of the morning. And, most of all, in how easily I can imagine the many joyful years ahead of us in this space.

My eternal thanks to our dear family for every bit of help, in the many forms it’s been given, that have enabled us to get here. To our forever home.❤️