Home Is Where The Heart Is

Home is where the heart is. I know we’ve all heard of this saying at least once in our life. There is truth to it. About eight years ago I moved to San Antonio Texas from the Chandler, Arizona. I remember my dad telling me “where home”, when we arrived to our new house. I remember thinking this is not my home, my home is back in Arizona with the family I grew up with and the friends I hold close to me. At the time I was disappointed to be in San Antonio. I thought San Antonio was just a poor city with nothing to do. I was missing home to mulch to see all the beautiful things that this city had to offer.
As the years went by I made new friends, I became closer to my dad’s side of the family. I felt like our house really became my “home”. For the first couple of years my family and I acted like tourist. We went everywhere; Downtown, the Alamo, the missions, and the malls. There were times when we would just drive around town, just to see the view. After a long day of visiting the sites we would always travel home.
Home is located just south of the San Antonio downtown area. We live just off of Military Dr. The neighborhood’s major intersection is Military Dr. and Roosevelt. There is an Exxon located at the corner, and if you continue going south west on Military Dr. there is a Biller Millers on the left and a couple of years ago there was an old Walmart, but now there is a store called Steve and Barrey and a bank. On the right of Military there is a community thrift store and a liquor store, a watermill, a tire repair shop and a churches chicken. This is where Quintard street appears, we make a right here. This is where we enter the neighborhood. Now there is a storage place on the left and a mechanic shop on the right (our family mechanic and my dad’s good friend). Continue a little further down and you come to a street called Dickson. Now you would make a right on Dickson and we live three houses in from the corner of Dickson and Quintard, on the right hand side. This is where our home is located.
We live in a beautiful neighborhood. The houses are modest but very well maintained. I guess you would call this area middle class. The people that lice in this neighborhood are all different. We have elderly couples with grandchildren who visit. There are small families and big families. There are even young home owners or renters, they are usually the ones with the most cars outside, but they never get in the way and they don’t cause any trouble. Most people in this neighborhood is like most of San Antonio, with a Mexican background. So there is something that they all understand, and that the need to party. I remember we had a big party with a DJ for my sixteenth birthday, and we invited our neighborhood all the way down the street. This was mostly a friendly heads up that the street might be a little crowded and the DJ might be loud into the early morning. Most neighbors actually came and others offered their driveways for parking. The neighborhood does not post a sign up that reads it’s a neighborhood watch, but I know we all keep an eye out for anything suspicious going on around the neighborhood.
One of my favorite things about this neighborhood is that if I take a walk down the street and across Roosevelt there is the Mission San Jose. I fell in love with this Church and all the sites around it. When my family heard that the church was starting Catholic classes for conformations, my sisters and I decided to join. Every Sunday we would attend mass and then we would walk over to the seniors center where they would have the CCD classes. Every Sunday, we always saw the same families and I met kids from different schools because of the classes. The people from Mission San Jose became my second family. My sisters and I volunteered for everything the church had planned; church events, giving to the homeless, and fundraising. The Mission San Jose is a beautiful feature that is just a walk away from our neighborhood.
Home is not that far from work, school or my friends houses. I work with Pocket Smart Wireless, and I have to work at two locations, South Park Mall and in the HEB on Military and Pleasanton. South Park is about a ten minute drive, depending on traffic and HEB is about a five minute drive. I attend school at Palo Alto College. The drive from home to school takes about fifteen minutes. Now, when I want to hang out with friends the last thing I want to do is take a long drive over to their house and have to take a long drive back home. So I think its great that all my closest friends live about five minutes away. My boyfriend, Joe, I am always driving to his house lives on Barret street. My guy best friend, Josh, lives down the street from Joe on Terrell St. My best friend, Denise, lives on Pyron. These are the places I am always traveling to on an every other day basis. A lot of or other friends usually all end up hanging out at Josh’s house, so it is great for me when it comes to traveling home especially if I am tired, because I don’t have to travel far. Another plus, since these are the places I usually go it saves me a lot of money on gas.
As the years went by, I learned to open up my eyes to all the things this city has right in front of me. The Mission San Jose being my favorite. I have gotten very comfortable with this city and my neighborhood that I can call this palace home and truly feel right at home. I still haven’t gotten use to this crazy cold one day hot the next day weather, then again I don’t think most “san antonians” have either. Even if I move away years from now I would be happy and proud to say I once called San Antonio “home”.