Homecoming

Happy Thanksgiving.  I'm elated to have enjoyed, and experienced, another one myself.  This year we got to visit our families in Alabama for the holiday, the first time we've shared that meal with our families in nearly a decade.  It was a grueling and fantastic visit:  I'm surprised by how beautiful my home state is every time I go back, and I'm exhausted from non-stop visiting and driving!  It was roughly 15 hours drive time each way, so we broke it up with a hotel stay (ALWAYS a hit with the kids) both times.  After visiting rocket museums, dressing up as Indians and Pilgrims for Thanksgiving Day, and observing all of the small and large changes that have lapsed in our home state since our previous visit two years ago, the strangest part of this vacation was coming back "home."

For so long, coming home has meant arriving back in the nether reaches of the Pacific Northwest to our tiny condo - almost always under the cover of cloud and mist and with very little fanfare.  This is not to say it was an unhappy or lonely place - quite the contrary in fact - just that we didn't know our neighbors all that well and Bellingham is a pretty introverted place by nature - we always got our welcome over the next several days.  Driving into Austin, however, was a different picture altogether.  We drove right into the midst of a large city, to our own house (with yard!), in the sun, and within two hours of our arrival, no less than four people had called out or come by to say hello and welcome us back.  (Again, no value judgment here.  For an introvert like myself, this picture is sometimes overwhelming...)

The whole scene felt somehow alien, like I had accidentally arrived home to someone else's life.  It made me feel like I've hit a (yet another) strange juncture in my journey - I have to accept a new kind of home. Seminary is such an odd place: on the one hand, you get to live in a community of people who love to build community, but on the other, you know you can't stay.  In this liminal place, we are all practicing for the lives we will one day have, while still longing for and mourning the positions we once inhabited.  I'm glad for the days I got to have the sneaky joy of slipping back into town under cover of darkness and having our own little private space again - where we could just be us: quiet, quirky, and alone.  But in volunteering to become the hub of a community, I am entering a new set of days - where the sun will always be out, and the neighbors will always be calling, when I come home again.