You Can't Go Home Again

Well, you can go home again. I mean, it's entirely possible to get in a car or on a plane and transport yourself to the geographic setting of your childhood. I think Thomas Wolfe though, meant that our childhood homes don't feel the same to us as adults that they did when we were young. 

I've been staying with my parents over the holidays in the house we moved into when I was sixteen. It started as a small lake cottage, morphed into an awkward ranch home, and when my parents' decided to make it our home, it was a mess. They've made it cozy and uniquely theirs (I call they're decorating style neo-cottage). This house is definitely home for them but it's not home for me. 

Before this place we lived in a little ranch house while I was in middle school and the first part of high school and before that we lived in the house where I was a kid: the hundred-year-old bungalow about which I could wax poetic all day. So, my idea of home can't really be one place. I have, in fact, never been back to my childhood home. That would be trespassing. "Home" for me is a series of places. It's the dollar theater on the square in Independence. It's my grandparents house in northern Michigan. It's the lobbies of every ice rink in the tri-state area. It's the suburban roads on which I learned to drive.

One of the ways I know that I cannot truly go home again is that I don't feel absolute freedom driving down Colburn Road with music blaring (then and now: Weezer). Tonight, driving back to my parents' house I found myself thinking about job prospects, putting a garden in our backyard in Indiana and what groceries we'll need when we head back at the end of the week. While I get dreamy and nostalgic remembering what it was like to be a teenager in this town, I don't miss it. I don't yearn for it. I...appreciate it. It's where, to use a terribly clinical term, my formative years happened and those will always be wonderful (if sometimes really awkward) memories. This is my long-winded way of saying that I know I can't go home again and I'm cool with that.