homecomings and homegoings

My family and I recently returned to Arizona from a two week trip visiting our old friends and haunts back in the Bay Area. Aside from the fact we returned to discover our air conditioner had broken in our absence and it was 100 degrees upstairs, it was nice to come back “home.” We had planned this trip prior to us moving to attend our son’s pre-K graduation at his former school so he (read: all of us) could have closure with his class and old friends and we could escape the summer heat.

It was odd going back and visiting as it at once felt familiar and unfamiliar. I had lived out in California for 12 years, the longest stretch anywhere after college and really where I became an adult. I had my two children there and brought them each home to the house in Oakland we just sold and wouldn’t be staying in anymore. I had made so many friends out there that became family. I missed the cool breezes, the mystical fog, the huge and majestic redwoods. I had made a life there, a home there, and moving away had felt bittersweet. But did it still feel like "home”?

Even though my paternal grandparents had moved to Arizona as young people themselves, my father was born there, my mother had lived there since she was a teen, and I had grown up there, I hadn’t chosen it. I never had grand plans to leave it, but it also always felt sort of uncomfortable. A little slow, a little dusty, not enough diversity and too much heat.

But as I grew older and I moved away, I appreciated it more and more with each return visit. The natural beauty of the desert, the surreal sunsets, the slower pace of life, the closeness to family, the history of my ancestors carving out their own American dreams. And when I had children of my own, I longed for them to have the same closeness to their grandparents that I did with mine. I also longed to have more support in raising my children and to be able to enjoy my relationship with my parents and my family as an adult.

At bedtime the night we returned to Arizona, my five year old son and I recounted our favorite parts of our California vacation. We talked about seeing our old friends and made plans on when to see them again. Then he asked me if we were staying in Arizona forever. I said, “I don’t know about forever but at least for now. And when you get older you can decide if you want to move somewhere else. What do you think?” And he sweetly replied, “Let’s stay here. I like this vacation the best.”

Kids have a funny way of saying something very simple on the surface, but deeply profound when you think about. What I took from it is that maybe “home” and “vacation” aren’t so different. And maybe they aren’t as much physical places, but more so states of mind and how you feel about a stage in your life. Anywhere can be home or feel like a vacation if you choose to treat it that way. So while a part of me will always be in California (and Minnesota, and Hong Kong, and all the places I’ve lived) at least for now, my heart is in the desert. Because like my son, “I like this vacation the best.”