When I was a very little girl, I lived at the corner of Regal and Marin in Berkeley. I went to Cragmont school, and my friends all lived right around me. We would ride bikes to each other's houses, or walk down all the blocks near our houses. We did a ton of daydreaming in Codornices park, looking at the cloud configurations and finding animals. We ambled through the Rose Garden-smelling all the roses. We raced to the top of Grizzly Peak to see who could get there first. We rode the train at Tilden Park, we dove into the small lake there, and we pet the animals at the petting zoo. At the library, we sat enthralled while the librarian read Charlotte's Web to us. At Cragmont Rock Park, we would pretend to put on Greek or Shakespearean tragedies under the canopy roof at the top of the walkway that was like a stage, or rolling down the grassy hill right there off Regal Road. I can still smell that fresh cut grass like it was yesterday. Every element of life, my senses and my dreams were moored in the reality of my hometown.
My home was not theoretical, it was actual, and vivid in every way.
When my father died, we moved to New York City. I was nine, and it was a change that wrenched my heart. I was in deep grief, I hadn’t been able to bring all my toys with me, and I had no friends there. Nothing was the same. I didn't even know who to be when faced with all the new smells, sights, sounds (particularly sounds), and the change in the vibration of life that surrounded me. In short, I felt like I had no home.
Gradually, I started to make friends, feel comfortable, and know my way around. But it never felt like the home I carried in my heart. It was not Berkeley. It was not the set of feelings and beliefs that made me who I wanted to be. Who I could be.
So, I began a very long and circuitous journey back to the place that felt right. That made me feel like an insider and not an outsider. The place that felt like a real home.
I am telling you all of this to let you know how important the concept of HOME is to me. It is so much more than a building, or shelter, or an address. It is at the very root of who you perceive yourself to be. It is what motivates me every day to work hard for my clients, to sell their homes so they can move where they want to be, to help them buy a house, so they can feel what it feels like to really have a home. It is cliche to say "HOME is where the heart is", but I have genuinely made it my life's work to make HOME happen for people.
