My mom's advanced dementia is such that the only home she recognizes from a photo is the house she grew up in coastal Georgia. She sounds very relieved when she sees a picture of it and says, "oh yes, that is my home."
Of course the house has not even been there since it was torn down around 1966 to build a bank. But what is really funny is this week I found a letter from her to my mother, written around 1962, saying that it was great that my grandmother had found a buyer for the house, and that it wasn't even that sentimental a loss for her anymore since they hadn't lived there in years, and it had been rented, and it was a great house to grow up in, but it was time to sell it and had she thought about how she was going to invest the money. This was my 36 year old mother writing to her own mother.
It's just so odd that she only remembers this house. I have to laugh, thinking about my brother being so eager to sell her farm house, and thinking, what if, in 20 years, it's the only house he remembers, or he only remembers the house we lived in when he was 10 years old? He actually sounds a lot like her in the letter-- "no need to be sentimental, etc. etc." and yet here she is, 60 years later, and everything in her mind is gone except of that house, that equals home.
So I wonder what I will remember, if I get to her age, which I sure hope I don't, given how she is right now. What will be "home" to me?