Gary and I just returned from visiting my daughters and their families, a trip I had been looking forward to all summer long. It is difficult living 12 or more hours away, and not being able to be a regular part of each other's lives in a natural give and take fashion. The distance means that our time together is "all or nothing". We share meals and space and time, which is wonderful on the one hand, and yet it can also be a bit much if we stay too long. Remember Ben Franklin's adage that fish and guests begin to stink after three days? Well, we push that limit, mostly because it takes so long to get there, but our hosts are wonderfully understanding.
Each time we visit, I long for an easier way to be closer. I take stock of the landscape as we drive, asking myself if I could live there, if I would be happy there. Maybe I could be, but I already have a life that I love, a place that I call home. Almost thirty years ago, when I moved to Vermont I felt my roots grow deep down into the soil here.
Every time I cross the border back into Vermont it happens. It is a physical response that reminds me I am home. A speaker came to the small town where I live once, soon after we had moved here and said, "when you think about home, it doesn't matter where you were born. What matters is where you plan to live out your days. Where you plan to die." That felt true to me, someone the locally born folks were wont to call a "flatlander." I might have been born somewhere else, but this is my true home.
My history makes it all the more complicated that I miss my daughters so deeply. All I can figure out is that my heart must have more than one home. Putting truth to that, tomorrow Gary and I will drive up to Maine, anticipating a week on an island that also claims a piece of my heart, an island that also feels like home to me. My sense of home there has to do with the ocean and trails through pine forests, with glorious sunsets and growing friendships.
Truth be told, I often feel like I have left little bits of me here and there. Parts of me stay here in Vermont full time, while bits of me hunker down in other places that have touched my heart, and, of course there will always be parts that hang around with those whom I love. Maybe that is just the way it is when home is made up of several places, and people too?
