Heart and Home…

I’ve discovered that a city, while you’re vacationing there, behaves similar to a person on a really good first date.

From a blog called Stripsearch LA

When another blogger ‘likes’ a post of yours you get a notice of it, and a link to their blog so you can check it out. That’s how I happened across the comment above, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. It seems that every time I travel I find myself in love with this new place, this new scenery, and I always wish I could live there. And not because I am unhappy with where ever I might be calling home at that moment, at least I don’t think I’m unhappy.  But I have always been ready to move on to the next place, as if somehow that will be some sort of answer to an unspoken question. Because if I lived there then life would be perfect? I would be perfect?

Maybe it’s because I left home at such a young age. I was 20 when I married and moved away from my home town in Massachusetts, never to live there again. But whenever I would visit I’d have an overwhelming sense of being home.  I loved driving through the little towns and looking at the houses and landscape that I grew up expecting to be part of my life forever. There is a connection there that has never lessened even though I haven’t lived there in, yikes, almost a half a century.  It’s the countryside, the trees, and the lawns with their meandering stone walls.  And little Cape Cod houses with their weathered shingles, and their breezeways, and attached garages. What would my life have been like if I would have stayed? What would I be like?

Because I haven’t ever formed a connection to where I’ve lived since, not really. I moved to the James Rouse planned community of Columbia, MD in 1976. I remember because we went with the neighbors to the bicentennial fireworks given at the lakefront ‘downtown’ that year. I hadn’t known that Columbia existed, or planned communities existed at all, but it seemed like a grand idea.  I knew that if I didn’t move there that I’d regret it. And it was a good place to raise kids, great schools, and every convenience was easily accessible. As the years went on and I’d find myself driving into my townhouse community that had become nestled in the trees over the years, and I’d recognize that if I was traveling and happened across this place I would say to myself that I would want to live there. I had come to think of my yearning for something different as a character flaw, and maybe it was. I liked it there, it was beautiful, and I lived there longer than I lived in Massachusetts, but when I left that place I never looked back.

And now here I am, in arguably the only place in the country where I could live as comfortably as I do on my income.  A ‘perfect’ place where my expenses are low, I don’t have to shovel snow, and my medical expenses are almost nil.  I appreciate being here and I love my little house, my neighbors, and my job. But is it home, in the sense that I think of New England as being home? No, not really.  I expect that whenever I head north to visit family and friends I’ll always breathe that sigh of relief when I look out at the scenery and know that this is where I come from, this is home…