Going Home Again
There is an old saying “you can never go home again”; in many ways it is true. I grew up in a small New England town that I haven’t visited in many years. Many of my oldest friends still live there, but my siblings and I moved away. I have no purpose to visit my old hometown where I grew up unless it is to go to the cemetery. Facebook keeps me connected with the goings on in town and the reunions being planned. The last time I was there was to say goodbye to my parents. It was mostly to honor both of their wishes. The family home had been sold years before and all the neighbors we knew had also left the street. Family was now spread across multiple states and our ‘homebase’ was no longer ours. It was an unsettling feeling. Still, the same roads were there and so were most of the houses/landmarks. The ‘brook’ that ran under Main Street from the fire station pond was now barely a trickle and the fire station was now the town’s Historical Society building. The library that was once housed in the town hall had moved into its own building. While my home town had a familiar feeling, so much had already changed. I used the phrase “remember when” quite frequently on that trip.
It was different when my husband and I recently went back to South Florida to visit friends we haven’t seen since we moved to Central Florida five years ago. The roads were the same, still full of traffic. Our friends still lived where we left them, the schools and playing fields were all still there. The routines were the same; timing the roads based on when the elementary, middle school, and high school were released. Driving by my old high school was bitter sweet. I spent eight years there with some fantastic students and teaching peers. While so much stayed the same, the changes were much more significant. All the farms, but one, sold their land to developers. Now, huge housing developments with zero lot lines have replaced them. There are more strip malls and open-air plazas filled with restaurants, offices, and retails stores of all kinds. Did I mention the traffic? It was grid locked east to west and north to south. The traffic was constantly bumper to bumper and endless. I missed the country back roads in central Florida. I truly miss my friends, but I realized on this trip that I could never move back. The changes were too great. A five-hour road trip one way takes a toll on your body as we age, so driving down south is not an option to do frequently. However, now there is now a train service to Central Florida if someone doesn’t want to drive and there is always Zoom or Google Meets that help us stay connected.
It’s interesting that while I would not move back to my hometown in New Hampshire or back to South Florida. I still miss them. I think it’s the memories or the comfort of those memories. I still long to visit them, but they’re no longer my home.
For today, I leave you with a quote on this topic from Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram,
"It’s said that you can’t go home again, and it’s true enough of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.
Cheers to the storyteller in all of us!