37 Houses

As a military family, we moved houses with regularity. As an adult, I found it difficult to stay in one place. I’ve lived in 37 different houses which averages out to a year and “a bit” for each location. The project started when I was chatting a friend about the feeling of home. “It takes exactly six months before a house feels comfortable,” I said with authority. It was an odd enough certainty that I started to explore.

The research alone has been daunting. There are homes that are now torn down, homes I no longer have any record of the address and homes that are so fundamentally altered from the time that I lived there that they are unrecognizable to me. This is not a complete record, but then again it never is. It’s a self-evident truth to those of us who have been nomadic: memory and location are married to each other — the recreation of each of these places has stitched my memories and sense of my own identity back together.

I purchased a house a year ago and have zero intention of moving for a long, long time…and as such have no sense of urgency in moving through this project. The slow passage of certain time is the greatest luxury I can allow myself.