The Friday morning of Homecoming 2024 was drizzly, hot, and humid—the antithesis of what the yellowing leaves indicated the weather should be. I wouldn’t need my Penn State hoodie over my Alumni Association T-shirt for warmth, but possibly for keeping dry, so I grabbed it on my way out the door. I was headed to the Hintz Family Alumni Center to join the rest of the Alumni Association staff in greeting 900-plus alums upon their return to campus.

I had just one stop to make first: the bank. That morning, I was closing on my new house. After two frenzied months of hunting, viewing, inspecting, negotiating, and documenting my existence as a gainfully employed adult who makes financially sound decisions, I bought a house I love. Or, as my real estate agent put it, I “said yes to the address.”

We often use the words house and home interchangeably. A house is just brick and mortar, walls and windows. A home is that and more. It’s where the heart is, right? It’s the place you can always return to, where you feel welcomed back into the company of people who care about you. It’s where you belong. I’ve had quite a few houses and apartments in my time, but few homes, and after a couple of life’s pesky false starts, I recently found myself back at a square one I hadn’t anticipated: not homed, and only temporarily housed. In a prime example of bad timing, my parents, looking to downsize, had moved out of the family home the previous fall. When the “SOLD” sign went up, I’d felt a wistful inkling that I had lost my chance to buy my home base, the one threshold on the planet I could cross at any time and feel instantly safe.

But in closing that literal and proverbial door, another one opened for me in the form of a cozy, renovated Cape-style three-bedroom on almost a half acre just outside of my little town.

After signing a mountain of paperwork, I crossed Pine Grove Mountain with a new appreciation for both definitions of home. We need a sense of belonging and connection in our lives nearly as much as we need a warm, dry place to rest our heads, after all. As my colleagues and I served Creamery ice cream and Penn State Bakery cookies to grinning alums—because Home Sweet Home!—I felt immense gratitude for this work, the work of storytelling and helping to foster that sense of belonging and connection for others, that not only affords me the means to buy my own house and make it a home for my son, but also makes us part of this enormous “home” that so many Penn Staters long to come back to year after year.  

Stacia M. Fleegal is the Penn Stater’s online editor.