I’m in the basement of the library in my home town. My parents don’t have wifi (WTF??) and I needed to get on some meetings for work since I’m trying to wrap stuff up before the holidays. (It is freaking cold. I forgot how much freezing cold winter air hurts every part of your body. Why do people live like this?) It’s very weird to be here again in my hometown. I hadn’t been here in a few years and every time I come back, it seems smaller than I remember it.
It got me thinking about how strange it is: there are some people I went to high school with that left here and really never looked back. And then there are some people who went away to college and as soon as they decided to start families, moved right back here. I guess if you have kids, this is a pretty good place to live (notwithstanding the ridiculously cold winter weather); but from my perspective, this place feels like a sweatshirt that, while comfortable, is a bit too snug and worn out. Maybe it’s just because this place was once so central to my world – but it was a world that I tried to escape from as soon as I could. I wanted to get out and see the world. I wanted to get out and meet new people. I wanted to get out and have new experiences. I wanted to get out and see what else was out there. It’s alien to me to think that I would have felt that way and then settled back down here as an adult.
And it’s even weirder that as I’m driving my dad’s car around, I’m back to the family dynamic of when I was 16, except now my parents are being very deferential to me (ha, complete 180 from my teen years!) and that is weirding me out even more. How strange it is to grow up, move out, and then come home again – even if it’s only for a long weekend.
My dad is doing ok, although he looks diminished in a way I wasn’t expecting. I talk to my parents fairly often, maybe once a week. But seeing him in person was a jolt. It is a real smack in the face that as much as I try to deny that life is passing along, everyone I know and love is growing older. And that brings up fears of loss that I know I’m not prepared to handle yet. Living in Texas, I can pretend that somehow the world has become stagnant, time isn’t passing by so fast. But being here this weekend, it brings to the forefront exactly how much has changed since I drove south 8.5 years ago. The town looks smaller, some houses have been painted different colors or torn down to make way for bigger homes, the library is massive… and my parents look older…
It’s a homecoming that I wasn’t prepared for…