Coming Home

My family and I have just moved back to our home in upstate New York after a year's sabbatical. We have been welcomed by cool temperatures and blue skies like the Sky Blue in the Crayola box. Sweet breezes blow through the opened windows, and I find myself pausing by them to take long, deep breaths of the fresh air.

Our trees are in full leaf, and I see a curtain of greenery when I look out the window. Our backyard, neglected for a year, is growing a crop of chest-high weeds that the neighborhood wildlife are enjoying. On Tuesday I spied a young doe, her legs curled under her, nestled in the tall grass while five turkeys pecked for seeds around her.

Moving--and transitions in general--stirs things up for me, in ways good and bad. It makes me question the idea of home, of permanence, of belonging. In so many ways--in time, in space, in emotional connections--I am far from my own home: the place where I grew up and where many of my friends and my extended family remain.

Yet this old house in a Northeastern college town to which my family has returned is home now. My family has settled into its cozy nooks, tuned their ears to footsteps on creaky stairs. My older kids have trudged up the hill to school for six years, checking the hole at the base of the tree next door for the snake that once made its home there. They have learned to ride their bikes and navigate the steep roads. My youngest was born here, took his first steps and formed his first words here. He'll be starting his own journey up that hill for kindergarten soon.

And me? The transplant? I guess I've put down my own roots here as well as I've seen my little saplings grow and thrive. It's been a slow process of adaptation to a cold climate. Of navigating social nuances that seem foreign to me sometimes.

In my year away I have realized that maybe I've leafed out a bit myself, formed some new branches that have reached out to connect with the big blue sky here. My new old home. It's good to be back.