Always Coming Home
I'm part of a generation or group in America who moves fairly frequently. Except for those long, blissful years at the farm, in the past ten years I've moved nearly every year, and sometimes more than once per year. I moved into this house as a purposeful transition stage, and always intended to move out after a year. This proved more difficult than I expected, but here I am, moving out. I don't think this is particularly healthy or good on a number of levels but I don't try to justify this, it's just the way things are with me, at least for now.
Anyway, when I move, I always find myself thinking about what home is to me. It seems to me that home is not a specific house, or a city, other sort of place, but instead it's a region where I can see hills and mountains of the right shape, with mostly deciduious trees on them, where I can experience each kind of weather in its season, including big temperature differentials in a short time period, and especially including summer thunderstorms. Where things still feel a bit rough and unfinished. So I mostly feel at home in the Appalachian mountains, but occasionally, briefly, in other, disparate places such as certian parts of Honduras, California, and Brazil. The Appalachians are the place where I can always feel at home, so I find myself returning here again and again.
[...] I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.
-- LeGuin
Maybe one day. For now it's travel, travel, travel..