You Can't Go Home Again

We'd been avoiding it since we got back to town. Thank goodness when we bought it, we'd selected a neighborhood that wasn't on the path to anywhere else. At the time we thought the remoteness would make for peace, quiet, and dark skies for taking the telescope out. It was all of that, although we tended to watch more satellite and space station passes because we could catch those with binoculars. But for the past four months we've gotten a different benefit out of how out of the way it is.

This afternoon, Orion and I were going stir crazy. I wanted a coke and he needed a snack, so I figured we'd drive through McDonalds. When we pulled away from the drive through, it just felt like the car was pointed there. Pointed home. I let the car take me there, like a dog that runs away after a cross country move and turns up later back at the old house.

I expected it to have changed a lot. I figured that there would be different plants, new window treatments, and that something would have finally been done with the precious front porch that I had always meant to decorate. But aside from the bushes being bigger and the new owners having (finally) removed the ornamental grasses that I hated so much, it looked exactly the same.

I expected to be sad and had braced for it the whole way there. I thought that seeing the house again would conjure memories of all of the life we lived there. This was the house we brought Orion home to, where I'd walked back and forth in the living room for hours in the middle of colllicky nights. Surely, I'd mourn the loss. Surely I'd feel, well, something.

But I didn't. I left there for the last time just about a year ago, and today when I drove past it (twice) I was driving past someone else's house. I realized that wanting to have "A" home again didn't really mean wanting to have "THAT" home again and that just maybe, home wasn't even a building to begin with.