Home.

I forgot how hard it is to go home.

I'm sitting up late at the dining room table at my parents' house in Iowa. Weird, I've never referred to it as my parents' house before. Maybe it's because my room is gone. Well, technically it's still there, with its green-painted walls and overloaded bookshelves--but the room is filled with the stuff of our foreign exchange student (which is awesome; I am entirely glad she is filling the space with life). But it's weird, you know? It's weird to return home after two years away, two years in which I've changed more deeply than I can express, and to settle back into the space that once formed and comforted me. It's slightly unnerving--like trying on winter sweaters when October rolls around, and the long sleeves and cozy wool feel unfamiliar, foreign, confining. There's something just--well, weird--about returning home.

Yet there's something utterly charming about it too. I still squeal with delight when I cross the Mississippi River and drive into the soaring tree-covered limestone bluffs of Iowa. There is something wonderful about parking in front of my family's red brick house and getting out of my car to be bowled over by the frantic yelps and excited licking of my dog. There's something reassuring in dinnertime conversations that flow naturally for an hour or more, with my brother and sister and I resorting right back to the teasing, joking chaos we grew up creating. Something about Iowa will always be home for me.

But the reality is also that this place is no longer really home. Home is also vanReken Hall, and City Hope Church, and the political science department offices in DeVos, and Supper House at St. Alphonsus, and the #6 Rapid. Home is Jack, and Alyssa, and Grassroots, and the KHvR Barnabai. Home is people and places and memories. I read a great quote on facebook (yeah, yeah) and it's been toying at me this evening. It's a quote from an author and anthropologist named Miriam Adeney. It speaks for itself.

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”