I returned home to visit with my Mom last weekend. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there becomes a tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were” and the “is,” the past, the present, and perhaps the future.
Tenses get tangled. Nouns don’t flow. The contours of a geography redrawn.
See also:
The thing about long-term relationships
You tilt the energy toward the present; slide all the feelings toward the future, pretend you can sift out the sad parts, the bad parts, the hard parts. Keep only the “is” and the happy so it “will be” in the future. The reflective bits gleaming forward.
In fact, the path to home is people. No matter where she is in the world, the geography of that home I’d always known is where my mother is, where my broader family is.
No matter the changes, there is always a path back home. And “home,” a four-letter word of a different kind — “poof” — transformed.
