If I was to write this essay before the pandemic hit, I would say a house is just a place you live, and a home is the place where your heart is. I know that it’s cheesy to say, but that is what I believed. I also would have given you the dictionary definition which is a house is “a building for human habitation, especially one that is lived in by a family or small group of people”(google.com) while a home is “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household”(google.com). Now, I have a different answer. Before the pandemic, my home was just a house. Every evening after school I would go home to “my house”, never really saying that I was going home. As the pandemic hit and everyone was given orders to stay home, that is when my house really became my home. My “house” was no longer just the place I went after school to be with my family, it was now my entire world. My house had turned into a home, a school, an office, a restaurant, an arcade, a movie theater, and even a doctors office. In a small sudden moment of time, my view of where I lived had completely changed. Well, what changed you ask? Obviously I was living in the same place I had been for the last 6 years of my life, but it wasn’t the physical house itself, it was the role it played in my life and the people in it that made it my home. The pandemic forced me to grow closer to the people in my family, as well as find things to do at home. It was no longer just a living space, it was a special place filled with memories, with experiments, with delicious food, and with lots and lots of emotions. We got to experience so many new things that we had never done before. Whether it was attaching glow sticks to us and turning off all the lights so we could dance, or running up the stairs while playing tag and fracturing my elbow, or trying new recipes that we found on pinterest, or even drawing a chalk mural on the back fence that can still be seen today. It is hard to give an exact definition for what makes a house a home, and for everyone that answer is going to be different. But if I had to narrow it down, a house is a living space, while your home is a place that tells a story, but not just any story. It tells your story
