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photo © 2005 Jeffrey (via: Wylio)This week I went to Durham for a couple days to visit a friend, and it felt like coming home.  Coming home to a place, not just people, which I'm not sure I've ever felt before.  Ever. 

My family moved around a good bit when I was a kid, so I never associated home with a particular place.  Home was wherever my family was.  This lack of place-based home has been a blessing in some ways.  It means I'm always excited about new places and don't find leaving horribly heart-rending.  But it also means I feel a little disconnected from the idea of home.  My roots are shallow and scattered.  And though home is still mostly the people I love, as it should be, I could move with those people just about anywhere (in the country at least) and still call it home, even when I feel like an outsider in the community. 

So when I found myself struggling not to cry as I was leaving Durham, I was a bit taken aback.  Because as much as I would've loved to stay with my friend another day, it wasn't leaving her that was making me cry.  It was leaving Durham.  I could feel it physically in my chest. 

So maybe I do have a place-based home after all.  Which kind of makes me sad.  Because I may never live there again, and frankly, I don't want to yearn for a place I cannot have.

But I am hopeful.  Hopeful that eventually this new adopted place will become home.  Hopeful that eventually that trip back up into the mountains will inspire the same kind of yearning.  Hopeful that eventually living here will just feel right rather than novel.  It could happen.