Ad Lib

Does “home” mean a house (or dorm or barracks or yurt)? Or does it mean family and friends?

“Home” is a sense of security and belonging. It is both internal and external: the calm refuge of my soul within and the noisy, boisterous places where I meet and connect with those I love.
LINDA MOTZKIN, Jewish chaplain

I have no real concept of a family home or home town. I move on average every two years. Outside of the JAG Corps, Skidmore is my community. In Iraq, many of my colleagues drew strength from thoughts of a homecoming with family; for me, that homecoming was a return to campus, which has always welcomed me as warmly as my family.
LT. COL. ROB RESNICK ’88, Army lawyer

When I went home for the holidays, I realized you never know a place until you leave it. When I landed in Africa, I was so happy to be in that heat, to have home food, to go to my home church. Going back gives me so much energy. I’m not ready to leave Swaziland permanently.
NOMVULA NDWANDWE ’08, economics major

Home is a funny thing. When I return to the town where I was raised, I refer to the trip as going home, although I haven’t lived there for fifty years. Home is also where I live now, where I raised my children. And even when I’m traveling I feel at home, as long as my wife is with me. So home is really wherever my best friend and lover is—it’s easy and comfortable, but also complex because it must be fed and nurtured.
JOHN THOMAS, professor emeritus of geology

Home for me is certainly somewhere in China, but a fantasized China. It’s changed so much. When I did go back, the places I remembered were gone—torn down, built over, changed politically through war and revolution. Home is an existential space—more a matter of friends, shared ideas, values, and cultures than of place.
JACK LING, lecturer in liberal studies, director of institutional diversity