My Little Home...

I am trying to adjust to a new home.  Alone.  What might be an exciting prospect under different circumstances, is now full of anxiety and loneliness. 
But the truth is that the anxieties were not so very different before the move.

Although I have said previously that I am not a Laura Ingalls Wilder groupie, still I have taken some of her writing to heart.  In particular, she has a way of writing about home and the loneliness of being away from home that struck me. In "Little Town on the Prairie", the author writes "There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home."  And in "These Happy Golden Years"  Laura is shocked by her anxiety, walking to the school she will teach, from the unhappy shanty where she is boarding, and thinks (paraphrasing) "I do not wish to go on, and yet I would not go back."
I find it ironic that I do find  so much meaning in it, since her pain is so intense because she is used to the love and comfort of home, while my own pain is from not feeling a love or comfort of home at least since I was very young, maybe never, certainly never consciously.  It would seem that the need for home is so ingrained, that one can deeply miss it, even without experience of it, or with only a very warped interpretation. 
So I need to try to create a new space to call home.  It is a small space, and you might think that would make it easier to fill up with "home-ness", but emotional space holds a deceptive connection to physical space.  I have the beginnings of a two-pronged plan:
1) Fill the physical space with things I enjoy; enjoy seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting.  Do not create an attachment to anything I don't enjoy.  This means not spending money on anything I don't really love, which further means, I will physically fill the new home very slowly as resources permit.  I have accepted some freebies, but they are clearly temporary, and I have little attachment to them. (Although I thank every single person who has given or lent me these essential, truly I cannot thank you enough).
2) Fill the emotional space with new happy memories.  Until now, when I got together with friends, it was usually to "go out".  I hope to start soon to have friends "come in".  I need to bring friendship, love, laughter into my home.  And I hope to start right away.
Come visit my little home.  I'm ready.