Undergraduate / My grandparent's house; Place where I am perfectly content; Princeton [4]

Hello everyone
Please can you kindly go through my essay on the following Princeton prompt and advise me on how to improve it and also how to cut-short it without disturbing the flow of the essay as my essay is 20 words more than the limit of 650 words. Any suggestions or comments are highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Prompt: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you.

My grandparent's house in our village is the place where I feel I am perfectly content. It is just not a place but the heart of my family and our relationships. Though presently we live miles away and visit it only every summer, it is still the best place on earth to me where I cherish very gratifying memories. It endears to me as a place where I started the journey of my life and has the roots of my upbringing under the tender and loving care of my grandparents. The house was not an epitome of architecture but was definitely an embodiment of placid people embellished with warmth of love and affection. It is a small house with three bedrooms and the front door of the house was connected to the gate of the garden with a huge open space leading to a set of concrete steps. These concrete steps are the adobe of all our cousins where we would sit for hours together exploring the innumerable stars in the sky, and sharing and caring for each other relishing the delicious South-Indian dishes made and served by the superwoman of our family, my grandmother. Those immensely treasured moments are cherubic and perpetual in my memory.

I have a special association with my grandfather's old-fashioned Paduk chair whose arms are exceptionally polished to give that mirror surface look. My grandfather would sit in that chair with all of us around facing the soft billowing greens of planted paddy fields just opposite to our backyard telling the stories of his times reminiscing the feelings of harmony and renewal. Watching the dust rising from the emerald green paddy fields and orchards with the symphony of birds flying high into the clouds is one of the most calming experiences under the sun. It is a beautiful village with picturesque landscapes, incredible variety of rare and native species of flora, peaceful and pristine environs of the echoing hills, and the tranquility of the Penna river flowing through the village makes one awe-struck with the serenity of the place. Swimming in the Penna river, rowing a boat, flying kites on windy autumnal evenings along with my cousins were some of the many riveting endeavors we all cherish till date. How can I not mention the hospitality and amicability of the wonderful and diligent people in the village who welcome us with the same affection even today when we visit them every summer? My grandparents, the house, especially the shared concrete steps, and the village have taught us some of the biggest lessons of life, which in fact have enriched the quality of life we have now in an otherwise bleak and entangled city life.

My father's profession brought us in to a rather perturbed and strident city culture, which I still like because I am a part of it, but my true identify come from my grandparent's village where I belong to. It is a feeling of paradise lost when I am not there, but my family, including my cousins, visit the place every summer and even today I feel the same warmth a real home bestows and I constantly bombard myself with the childhood memories from the place and relinquish myself to the real contentment and gratification I esteemed and still esteem at this marvelous place. Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a ground identity and this is what my grandparent's house is to me where I am perfectly content because here I can revisit my upbringing values which have in fact positively affected my life, and this place is extremely meaningful to me as I am free to be my true self without having to pretend to be a person who I am not as in an otherwise pompous and conceited world.