What Is My Home? - by Courtney Lipp

The year was 2003 and my location at the time was West Richland, a small town in Washington State. This place is named for those normal people that needed to know where my legally bonded house was ten years ago. This was the place I lived at when I was nine years old, but it wasn’t my home, my home was nothing like that place.

Home in my eyes is a place of happiness and safety, so why wasn’t this house in Tri-Cities my home. What was my home? At this point in my life my parents were always bickering which later lead to the divorce, but I’m getting ahead of my self.

Also at this time of my life my baby sister was two years old, which meant that everything was hers. So I a little girl lost all the old attention and lost all self-esteem. This was also the point of my life where my iron levels had received a higher place value, which had caused my body to gain weight.

This meant kids at school started to look at me funny and most of them had decide that because I was different that they no longer wanted to be my friend. So not only was this a bad time of life for me it was also the best.

This time of life lead me to my home; my home is a playground that is located one block away from where my legal address was. My mother let me go there any time I wanted and if I didn’t ask my parents it wasn’t bad because they always knew where to find me. What made me so fond of this playground was that it was my moment of freedom.

This playground had a chain-linked fence surrounding it, which allowed me to know that no one bad could ever get in, making it a safe quiet place to be. While I was spending most of my time at that park I was the happiest nine-year-old girl ever.

I had been such a lonely girl that when it came down to another person I was never bothered. I had always thought to myself that when it came down to it, I believed that I would never ever have to play with another person in my life. So when I went to the park, the one thing that got my whole attention was something so simple named swing. Swing could take me quite anywhere I wanted to be and all I had to do was close my eyes and pump my legs, lifting higher and higher away from my problems and hoping to never have to go back, but I always had to press the brakes to go back to reality.

I always knew that when I had to get away from the world I would at all times have the swing to take me there. My home was a playground two blocks away from my legal address as a child, and now I don’t know where it is.