My younger daughter was recently in Toronto at the wedding of a friend. On return she had some difficulty with her ticket and had to go early to the airport in order to clear it up. As she was talking to a woman in security, she said " I just want to get home."
Responding with wisdom, empathy, and an accent that indicated she knew the truth of her words, she said: "Somehow I understand that magic word - 'Home'"
Throughout childhood we hear this word, used in various ways and forms.
" Are we home yet?"
"How long until we get home?" "I can't wait to get home!" "I hate leaving home." "It's so good to be home!"And then adulthood comes, and home becomes more complicated even if you don't mean it to be. Is home where you grew up? Where your parents live? Where you now live? Where you are raising your family, or all of those combined?
You return home and home has changed, as have you. You leave, unsettled and discombobulated, happy to be leaving and sad that you are happy.
As life moves on, you become the one responsible for creating home, and in that space, home sometimes loses its purity and its magic. When we were little, magic and home happened. When we're big, someone has to create it. Yet somehow along the way, most of us figure that out. We learn that home and what Wendell Berry calls "membership" are an incredible privilege, and we grow to protect that privilege. We learn that our connection to place matters, and our keeping of that place is vital for mental and physical health. Home may no longer feel like magic, but it has become so much more.
It is our anchor in a world that is fickle and our bridge that equips us to cross over to the outside.Home. That place where we learn our first stories, where we lose teeth and grow inches, where we play and fight with siblings and grow nostalgic over time. For some, it is geographic; for others it is people, memories, and events that span the globe.
And one thing is sure-there is never more magic in the word then when we've been away, and we get to go back.
" Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go."*
