A chinaberry tree stood in my grandmother's front yard. Its limbs spread upward but the foilage drooped down. The children called it the umbrella tree. They were just tall enough to grab hold of its bottom branches, swinging and sailing loose into the low air.

When my grandmother, wise to the ways of children if not exactly sympathetic, saw my mother eyeing the higher limbs, she called out: "Don't climb up that tree. You won't be able to get down." My mother, of course, knew better. So late one morning while my grandmother was inside preparing dinner, Mama clambered onto the limb and up into the tree.

Space is the context of our physical life; we reshape it with our every move and pay it not the least attention. But space becomes place when we adopt a position in it. What had been a vague leafy space in my mother's mind became a place for dreaming and reverie, a place to share with her brothers and sisters, a place of her own.

The only problem was, she couldn't get down.

We each have an archetype of place that embeds itself early on, a shape and form that will for our entire lives speak to us of home. Without a single forethought, we enter a house or a landscape and our mouths grow soft; our bodies relax; we sigh. The ease is so fundamental we can't put our finger on it.

As a child, I lived in the trees. My bedroom was on the third floor; enormous windows opened onto mature hardwoods. Wood floors, wood walls, an extravaganza of green, sunlight ricocheting off the mirror. I dream in treehouses and on swings the way some others dream in dim, cool recesses and sheltered nooks.

Yet every week I talk with children whose sense of home has been so interrupted and traumatized that when we talk about that earliest landscape of safety and welcome, they shrug. They have no dreaming places. They never did.

Some have moved every few months since early childhood, in and out of foster care; sleeping in cars or motels; shuffled from one family member to another; hiding in abandoned houses at night to escape a violent parent's anger. What archetypal space resonates home for them? They draw a blank.

There are so many layers of lack in their young lives that whatever comfort and ease may have once existed, it is now almost totally obscured. It takes much courage for one boy to venture that he feels safe where he is alone. His archetypal welcoming space is the absence of others.

And also, no walls, he adds. Easy escape.

And also, brothers and sisters. A space where the siblings can be together again is a place you could call home. But no adults. No one from the troubled world that has caused them so much harm.

And also, a pool. A pool would be nice. We smile.

The average age of a homeless person in our country is nine. Nine. The number of homeless children in our country and our state grows by the week. What are we to do? How do we provide not just housing but home for those who have been so neglected? And if we fail, where will these children, who will soon have children of their own, find the skills to create what they never had? We worry about the safety net disappearing in this depressed economy, but these children don't need a net. They need a whole new landscape.

Mama tried every way she could to get down out of that tree but the truth is she was too high and too scared. So she yelled for my grandmother, who came onto the porch, looked at her, and said, "I told you not to get up there."

Then my grandmother went back inside. I suppose she figured that, like a cat, Mama would come down when she got hungry enough. Lucky for Mama, my grandfather showed up to noonday dinner, asked the obvious what are you doing up there, and swung his arms high to lower her down.

One generation plants the tree and another enjoys the shade. What trees are we planting for these children so their children will enter a decent, welcoming space? What are we doing today, this week, this year, to ensure that someday the shape of their young lives allows for the possibility of a place called home. It's a question worth answering.

Lynden Harris is the director of the Hidden Voices performance program. Write to her at lharris@hiddenvoices.org