The image I\u2019ve had in my mind–of doors closing for good on the past and new ones opening before us–seemed practical and realistic.\u00a0 Settled now, with a bit of history in our not-so-new house, I\u2019ve come to accept the fact that all children grow up eventually and, in the process, families do change, and sometimes they even move away from cherished places.\u00a0 Life chapters end. Pages turn.\u00a0 We acknowledge endings, create new beginnings, yearning all the while for permanence and\u00a0 security.<\/p>\n
And year by year, as my own family has shaped new rituals and memories in a new place, I\u2019ve struggled to make my fragile peace with Thomas Wolfe\u2019s famous truism, \u201cyou can\u2019t go home again.\u201d\u00a0 (Well, I keep telling myself, you can\u2019t, not in any literal sense. The day you sign those closing papers, the locks get changed and what was once yours no longer is.)<\/p>\n
And yet, lately I\u2019ve experienced one homecoming after another, homecomings at once unexpected, wonderful, and profound. In fact, I am typing these words while sitting on the porch of our former next-door neighbor\u2019s house, gazing across the driveway at our own old green house, solid and quiet and still on this hot summer afternoon.\u00a0 Plunked back into our old neighborhood –and, in some ways, right back into our old life — I can\u2019t help but think about homecomings in a more spiritual sense, homecomings that keep reminding me that everything is connected after all, and that although life is<\/em> always changing, beginnings and endings might be little more than illusions, constructs of our limited human minds that fail to take into account the bigger mystery.<\/p>\n A few months ago, Jack was invited to participate in a four-days-a-week training program in Boston this summer –long hours, hard work, lots to learn.\u00a0 \u201cIf you really want to do this,\u201d I told him at the time, \u201cI\u2019m sure we can figure out a way to make it work.\u201d\u00a0 He gave it some thought, and said yes.\u00a0 And I started looking into summer sublets\u00a0on Craig\u2019s List and putting out feelers to every friend within fifteen miles of the city.\u00a0 A few promising leads fizzled.\u00a0 And then our former next-door neighbors and best friends from across the driveway offered us their house.\u00a0 They would be in South Africa and could use a house sitter; we were welcome to move in for the month they would be gone.<\/p>\n And so it was that last Sunday night, Jack and I let ourselves in to the house where he spent some of the happiest hours of his childhood playing with his two best buddies, Nick and Will.<\/p>\n \u201cThis feels pretty weird,\u201d we said in unison, as we flicked on lights and called the cat\u2019s name.\u00a0 Our friends were halfway across the world by the time we showed up, and neither of us quite knew what to do in their house without them in it, too.\u00a0 I put some food in the fridge, opened the windows, unpacked my bag, and then tossed and turned all night, feeling like a trespasser in my best friend\u2019s bedroom.<\/p>\n Jack, veteran of countless sleep overs here and epic games of hide and seek, knows every nook and cranny of this house, but in the morning he told me that he\u2019d had trouble settling down himself.\u00a0 He was at a bit of a loss,\u00a0 missing his friend and not quite comfortable sprawled out in Nick\u2019s bed instead of in his usual spot, in a sleeping bag on the floor.<\/p>\n As it turns out, our old house is empty this summer as well, the owners having spent the last year abroad.\u00a0 And so it\u2019s been all too easy to imagine that, any minute now, we\u2019ll just saunter across the driveway and be at \u201chome\u201d again.\u00a0 From the outside, everything looks exactly as it did when we lived there. Which means I can fool myself into thinking that, inside, my dishes are stacked in the cupboards as always, our family photos are still on the walls, Steve is working away in his upstairs office, Henry\u2019s picking out tunes on the piano in the living room.<\/p>\n All during our first day here, I had to remind myself: those weeds in the garden are not mine to pull, the blueberries ripening by the garage, not ours to pick, even if no one else is around to harvest them.\u00a0 Jack has felt the tug in a different way.\u00a0 The other night, looking over at our old house as dusk fell, he mused, \u201cIf I ever get rich enough to build my own house, I think I\u2019ll make it exactly like this one.\u00a0 And then it would always feel like I was back home again.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, we are<\/em> making ourselves at home again, right next door.\u00a0 After a few days in Carol\u2019s kitchen, I know where the pot holders are and how to use her coffee maker.\u00a0 The New York Times is on the front lawn by the time I take Jack to his train at seven.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gone back to my old yoga studio for class each morning, taken long walks with old friends, visited the local farmer\u2019s markets (better than ever), and bought Jack a pizza at Joe\u2019s (exactly the same).<\/p>\n It\u2019s amazing how comfortable we\u2019ve come to feel, how\u00a0 at home we are here in our old world, even after all this time away. It seemed perfectly natural\u00a0 for Jack\u2019s pal Will, who grew up in the house behind ours, to saunter through the front door last night and say \u201chi.\u201d\u00a0 Within five minutes those two six-foot-tall guys were down on the floor, practicing a wrestling hold, sweaty and laughing, as if they were both eleven again.<\/p>\n Two days ago, I took a stroll through our old backyard and recalled the planting of every bush and perennial and tree. Remembering all the hours of hard work Steve and I put in over the course of our thirteen years here, trying to create our own version of paradise, I allowed myself a weepy moment at the sight of the weed-choked gardens and untended beds, as overgrown and rampant with vines as\u00a0 Sleeping Beauty\u2019s entangled castle. But then, all of a sudden, something in me lightened, and I think I let that particular sadness go for good.\u00a0 It occurred to me that this old, odd house that was our home for so long — built as a barn in 1850, gutted and turned into a house for humans in 1923 — has withstood both love and neglect, family life and family deaths, homecomings and goings, for over a century and a half. A hundred years from now, it will stand there still, holding its own silent counsel.\u00a0 Like all those who came before us, and all those who will come after, we were just a few mortals passing through.\u00a0 No big deal in the grand scheme of things.<\/p>\n And yet, the seeds we sowed during our own brief time here were not just for the vegetables and flowers that brought us so much passing pleasure, but also seeds of love and friendship that continue to bear fruit in our lives today, despite the passage of time and the challenges of distance. The day we moved away six years ago — a day that I saw at the time as a wrenching finale to our sons\u2019 childhoods and the life we\u2019d known — was in fact no such thing.\u00a0 It was just a day.\u00a0 Life transforming itself the way it does:\u00a0 this happens, and then that happens.\u00a0 In Buddhism it is said that all causes and conditions are related; that the world exists in a state of interdependence.\u00a0 Because one thing arises, another arises; because of this, that<\/em>.<\/p>\n And so it occurs to me now that I was mistaken to ever think of life as a simple series of endings and beginnings.\u00a0 How self-defeating, to try so hard to grab hold of those things I wanted to keep intact, with the idea that permanence just might be possible. Sitting here by myself, looking at the empty shell of a house that was once stuffed full of us — <\/em>but that is now the center of another family\u2019s universe — I think I finally get it: home really is the place where I am right now, if I choose to make it so. And if I\u2019m awake, and open, and loving what is, then I am always at home, no matter what roof is above my head or what return address I stamp in the upper corner of an envelope.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n