Define home. Is it the place you were born? The house that you grew up in? What about the people who have all the pieces of your heart, however scattered across the world they may be?

January is a difficult month for me. Winter break. Consistently, it has proven to be a stretch of days that cause the most duress in my life. Relationships become long distance as I make the two and a half hour trek back to the place I spent my formative years. Thirty days of my mother and my two cats and the tiny apartment we call home. This year, as winter had begun to flatten the insignificant upstate town I live in, my mother decided to move again. It takes two hands to count the number of times I've changed residence since I was born and I'm only 21.

The process of packing boxes with the most efficiency possible has become something that I am intimately familiar with. During the moves, which my mother always plans around my winter vacation, I am forced to wade through piles of dusty memories while she is at work. She leaves in the morning, rousing me from a slumber that had just begun at dawn, when infomercials captured the television. "There's a note on the counter," she says. "I love you," she says. I cringe at her hovering figure, which is silhouetted in that early, early morning glare of the sun. We are a note family, she and I. Loose pages of farm-themed paper lay haphazardly in the kitchen. "Be back @ 2 for lunch. Make pb&j for me please. Have a good day. Get stuff done!! Love you, Mom."

Settling in with a CD on and a glass of apple juice at my side, dust motes swirl as I plow through cabinets that haven't been touched since our last move. It's a funny ache that strains your chest when you find pictures cracked and bent from a time that you can barely remember. Diaries with broken locks and childish scrawl, "Mom and dad fought again today. I played with Melissa. We had grilled cheese." The clock takes on this alternate method of time, much like that of being stuck in a mall. Minutes seem to pass much more quickly as I shuffle through the scraps of my childhood that have made it this far. We lose a little bit with each move. I must confess; that's my doing. It's also something I will inevitably regret as the years pass. Tossing out the photo of my face smeared in calamine lotion at the height of chicken pox is something that will invariably haunt me.

My mom's arrival home for lunch is never a surprise. The cats are waiting at the door minutes before she actually crosses the threshold of the building. The lock clicks open and she finds me, still pajama-ed, surrounded by piles of, well, our life. Awards, photos, CDs best left forgotten (too embarrassing even for the garbage man to see), statues, trinkets, books: it's all there. These are the vestiges of our accomplishments since we became a two-person family. Like a song I know by heart, I can close my eyes and see what she's doing next. She steps gingerly over the piles, in her uniform that smells like dental instruments and elevator music, kisses the top of my head, tells me she loves me, jokes about what time I finally awoke, crosses to the fridge to unwrap the cellophane on the sandwich I've made her, gossips about her patients, reads the New York Post, tells me she loves me - again.

With every living space, her lunchtime is something that has never strayed from routine. Each move is celebrated with this familiarity, and more than anything else in my life, it's the closest thing I've got to a definition of home.