Going Home
I recently went back to my hometown to visit some of my Mom’s older friends who still live there; something I do a couple times a year. I always plan my homecoming with back to back visits trying to see as many of her friends as possible. I love the visits and am grateful to see each one of them. Somehow, they help me feel a close connection to my mom by being in friendship with them. We inevitably reminisce of days gone by and each time I come away having heard yet another new story and learned a little bit more about my parents and my past.
The other day, one of my visits was cancelled at the last minute so I found myself with some free time. I decided to drive around town visiting places where I had spent a large amount of time growing up and places that had meant a lot to me. I visited the house I lived in when we moved to town, the elementary and junior/ senior high school I attended, the ski hill where I learned to ski, my favourite corner candy store, the church I both cleaned and attended, and the grain elevators where my dad would sell his grain.
I became very nostalgic as so many memories flooded my mind with each place I visited. But what surprised me, and what I couldn’t ignore, were the pangs of incredible sadness I also felt of days long gone and of the people who no longer were part of this town I called home. In some ways I felt like an alien or a foreigner in what used to be a very familiar and comfortable place. I kept trying to remember things as they had been years ago hoping to find them as I had remembered. But everything was different. Intellectually, I knew the home I remembered only existed in my mind. It was a collage of people, places, events that I had created in my mind to give my life an anchor in time. I realized that it never existed as such but was always in a state of change; but these changes were gradual, and I did not even notice. Yet on an emotional level I desperately wanted to find things to be as they were and as I had pictured them in my mind from years ago.
As I drove home that night and reflected on all the memories of the little town I grew up in, I thought of Thomas Wolfe’s novel who wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again”.
This could not have been truer.
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