Country Roads, Take Me Home

Thanksgiving morning. I wake in the bed I’ve had since childhood, though the house has changed. On the other side of the room, there’s a huge wooden wardrobe that my dad designed for me a decade ago, my old collection of Breyer horses lining the top. The random assortment of knick-knacks that once occupied the cabinets and shelves filling the top half of the furniture have been replaced over time by dozens and dozens of books. They’re over-crowded, and organized in that way that makes perfect sense to the organizer but not to anyone else. When I get up, I can look on my desk and find newspaper articles that my mom clipped for me in the months I’ve been away. I can open my closet and slip on the firetruck-red Converse sneakers that I wore all over Rome. 

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Home. It's a place that manages to be universal and completely individual all at once. Though it means different things to different people, it is generally a place of comfort and familiarity, one we regard with great fondness. A place, a group of people, even just a feeling. Full of memories, memories that are your family's and yours, yours alone.

My brother and I both made it home for the holiday this year. He’s in his first year of grad school, and I’m in my first year of my first job out of college, but for four and a half days, the whole family was together again. My parents of course were delighted, but so was I. I had been away for five months; I left in the beginning of July in search of a job and hadn't been back since. It was great to go home again, even for just a short while.

At some point during this visit, though, between the cooking and the reading and the playing with the cat and the talking and the gift-giving (we had an early Hanukkah, since the four of us were all together), it hit me: how often will this happen in the coming months? In the coming years? 

In college, breaks are scheduled every three to four months. I would usually go home during these, but now that I’ve graduated, it’s not so simple. I have far fewer days off, and flights are expensive. Home time is no longer built into the schedule.

There are lots of things that people will tell you about your first year out of college, but what I never really heard about was the new relationship that forms with “home.” When does home stop meaning the place where your parents live, and instead mean the place you now live on your own? When do you stop spending your money and days off on a trip to your house (your parents' house?) and put them instead towards a vacation someplace new?

As I boarded the plane bound back to New York, I wondered: is there a set point at which you’re supposed to stop going home?

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The captain tells the flight attendants to prepare for takeoff. I switch on my music and look past my brother, out the window and to a graying sky. One thought rises above the rest.

Be back soon.