A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the concept of home for She Explores. I’ve lived in 3 different, non-adjacent states in the last 3 years, so moving and what “home” means to me has been on my mind a lot lately. Here are some more thoughts.
I forgot to care about my radio stations until I was about halfway through New York.
Driving from Virginia to Massachusetts requires about 8 hours, lots of tolls, and filling up on gas before New Jersey so you can make it all the way to New York without needing someone else to fill up your tank in the Garden State. (I grew up there, and I’ve had too many awkward interactions with gas station attendants. Mostly because I’m an awkward person, so the fewer people I need to talk to, the better.)
It also requires accepting the fact, a few hours into the drive, that the radio stations you’ve been listening to on your commute for the last year are no longer going to be in range in your new home state. You realize this new reality only once your go-to station starts to play its first flickerings of static.
All your stuff is packed into this U-Haul, though, and your apartment lease is up. It’s too late to go back.
Flash forward to a few weeks after I moved from D.C. to Boston, the purpose of that drive. I was heading north towards Vermont to go skiing and trying to settle on some new permanent radio stations to set in my car.
Imagine the (stupid) smile spreading across my face when my radio scanning paused for a moment on a country radio station with a familiar voice. Then more familiar voices followed, and one of them said the same show name as a morning radio show I’d often listened to in D.C.
It’s a national radio show. Who knew?
Not me, if that wasn’t clear. I’m a bit of an idiot.
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Moving is not unfamiliar to me. I moved three times with my family before I left for college. The first I can’t remember, because I was six months old when we moved from Connecticut down to Georgia. Then, just shy of my 7th birthday, we packed up and moved north again, this time to New Jersey, which is what I think of as where I “grew up.” Finally, less than a month before I left for college, my family moved to Ohio.
And yet, it catches me off guard every time. I love change, I’ll tell myself, trying to get hyped up for a new location and exciting new adventures. Total lies. I hate change.
I also hate packing, even just for vacation. I’ll procrastinate as long as possible, haphazardly throwing things into a bag or box until I’m pushing the boundaries of how possible it is to physically finish with the time I have left.
But even when we leave them behind, the places we’ve lived stay with us.
This is true for Washington, D.C., where I spent grey, snow-less winter days followed by a hot summer of laying around, feeling unfulfilled and uninspired by the billions of people swarming the (admittedly wonderfully free) national monuments. I think of those days passing me by in a blur, but I also think of the lavender farm where I had the best damn lavender lemonade I’ll ever drink and cherry blossoms bursting along the shores of the Tidal Basin.
For me, Boston is driving up to the White Mountains every weekend and the smell of fall (wood smoke and apples). It’s my first dim sum in a huge banquet hall in Chinatown, gorging myself on inordinate amounts of food.
And the smell of sunscreen brings me back to summers in high school, driving to the beach. Waiting impatiently in hordes of summer traffic for the drawbridge across the water to come back down after letting a tall boat pass through. Running to my car in shorts after basketball practice on a snowy February day, still overheated from running sprints and the squeak of shoes on rubber court ringing in my ears.
They say home is where the heart is.
I think it’s also where your mind is; the memories that take you back to a certain place in time. It doesn’t matter if that place no longer exists. For you, it always will.