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A Home Of One's Own

I have been reading Nelofer Pazira's A Bed of Red Flowers and am completely riveted. One line from her book will stay with me for a long time. She quotes her grandmother saying "Homeowners have one home, the homeless have thousands". That struck me as an amazing perspective.

I am the age where home-ownership is the norm rather than the exception. Most friends and acquaintances have owned one for a few years now. I on the contrary have no fixed address and am a vagabond in body and spirit.

Reading that line in Pazira's book made me count the number of homes I have lived in the last ten years - fifteen and counting. I have indeed felt "homeless" as one can in a time of great emotional destitution. I know what it is to have a thousand homes and yet not one.

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