I spent the afternoon taking photos in an old neighborhood that was being torn down for urban renewal. By dusk, as I was heading home, I passed a couple walking through the rubble. The man had a small bag of groceries, and the woman carried a large white stuffed bear. In a few months, this whole block will be cleared to make room for a river dock, and everyone living here will have to relocate. But right then, they were just walking back together at the end of a regular workday.
It’s easy to confuse a house with a home, assuming stability comes from a permanent address. But when a neighborhood gets demolished, the difference is hard to miss. It made me think of that line from Nomadland: “I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless.” A building is just brick and mortar; home is the life you build inside it.
We naturally look for physical safety, but walls crumble and places disappear anyway. What holds things together isn’t the concrete structure left behind in the dirt, but the people we share our lives with. Home isn’t a fixed location—wherever the people we love are, that’s where we belong.
Leave a Reply