THE RETURN

My concept of home has become a fluid thing.  When I was young it was simple, because my family only lived in two places from the time I was an infant to the day I was married.  My definition of home did not often need to be adjusted.  And home, of course, was where my parents were, just as it has now become any place where I live with my husband.

Still, the two of us have lived for significant lengths of time in six places in the last fourteen months, and only one of them felt like ours.  We agree resoundingly on this: we have, so far in our marriage, had only one true home.

We lived in a camper in the Sierra Nevada mountains as newlyweds.  We lived there six weeks, and at the time, it was the longest we’d lived anywhere together.  We lived twice as long in an apartment in downtown Des Moines this summer.  But the place we’ve lived the longest since we’ve been married is a corner apartment in a brick building at the far end of our college campus.  And it is our home.

It may be the length of time that makes this small space ours.  We’ve just moved back into it after a long summer away, and by the end of this school year, we’ll have logged eighteen months here.  It will take, relative to our still-young marriage, a very long time for any other place to rival this apartment for sheer hours passed beneath its roof.

It’s more than that, though.  It’s saying hello to an old friend.  It’s finding the space unchanged, and all of our memories intact.  A place will never really be ours until we’ve gone away and come back.  It’s our home because we’ve returned.