Our neighbours

are back.
They have spent the past seven weeks in Europe, in the country in which S.... was born. It is one of those former Communist countries and from what S.... has to say it is still suffering the consequences of having been one.
I wonder how many generations it is going to take to move away from some of the excesses of Communism? According to S.... officials still need to be bribed. Older people have expectations of the state - expectations of both good and bad with which they grew up.
They didn't bother to send the boys to school there. Although it might have improved their second language skills the time was too short. According to S.... there would have been other issues too. Education there is run along quite different lines.
I know when I see S.... she will tell me that she is glad to be back here even while she misses her family there.
Each time she has done this it has made me wonder about the way people migrate. I have an Italian friend who came here when she was twelve. She is now seventy-six and she has never been back to Italy. Would she like to go? I think she would but she won't. It isn't a journey she could physically make now.
I have English friends who have been backwards and forwards many times but don't want to live there any more. I have Vietnamese friends who went once about eight years ago - and came back "home" early even though they talked of going "home". Vietnam was not  home any more. They didn't like it there. 
My BIL's family migrated from Cyprus. Yes, he and his siblings were born here but they are the first generation to have been born here. 
I have other friends from other places and they all have their own views about where "home" is. 
We say things like, "I'm going home" and "I'm leaving home". We mean the place where we will sleep that night or where we will no longer sleep in the future. But is that all "home" is. It seems to me that "home" is more than that.
For other reasons I was reminded of Chapter 5 in Wind in the Willows - "Dulce Domum". Somehow Kenneth Grahame has managed to portray the essence of the word "home" in that chapter. I went and reread it again - and it made me feel "homesick" again. It is not a comfortable feeling. My second cousin's wife once described it as "the worst feeling in the world". It is. It is also one of the feelings which make us human. 
I think "home" is memories.