How do you answer the hometown question?

While I have little trouble talking at length about home and all that it entails – its physical location, its place in my heart, who and what shares my space, its appearance and characteristics, what it means to me, how it makes me feel – I do struggle to definitively answer one question:

“What is your hometown?”

During my childhood and youth, my family moved fairly regularly (both from city to city and house to house within the same city), a practice which I continued into my adult years out on my own. As you might expect, unlike someone who was born, raised, and lived the majority of their life in one place, my first response to the “hometown question” has to be a request for clarification.

Do you mean the place…

…where I was born?
…where I spent most of my childhood years?
…where I spent my high school years?
…where I attended college or university?
…where I lived for the longest period of time?
…where I currently live?
…where my parents live?

Or perhaps, from another perspective, do you mean the place…

…that feels most like home?
…I love the most?
…I wish was my hometown?

So many questions, so many different answers – all of them accurate in their own way, yet none completely satisfactory.

I think I’d rather stick to talking about home.

How do YOU define your hometown?
Please share!

(Originally posted in April, 2012.)