I’m running around Lake Como in Saint Paul, Minnesota near my brother’s apartment, passing the smiling summer faces of casual walkers, shirtless joggers, and babies caroling around in strollers.
The day is a perfect eighty degrees and sparks of fulgurous light dance on the surface of the lake. July flowers border the trail and each stride sends a small endorphic spurt that mixes with thoughts reaching both forwards and backwards. Tomorrow I will board a plane on a one-way ticket and return to Guatemala, a place I called home for four years between 2008-2012 and for the next two months it will be my home again.
All year, I have been going home—homes I’ve known my whole life and homes I did not realize I had. When the clock changed from 2012 to 2013, I was in a plane bound for Kenya, homeland to two adopted brothers. There I met their extended family, uncles, brothers and cousins, their houses had the hallmark of home—pictures of my family hanging on their walls, an unquestioning welcome and people who had thought of my family as their family even before meeting any members.
Three months later a plane landed in New York, the home I chose for myself in the states after returning from a five years South of the border. A friend met me at the airport and let me stay with her while I got my work and housing figured out.
Three weeks ago I returned to where I grew up, Bismarck, North Dakota where Family is a proper noun.
My geography has been whimsical this year, but regardless of where my body rested people in each place made me feel at home.
On the second lap around the lake I think of what home means to me. I run through different metaphors and explanations. Eventually, if I’m lucky, if I’m open to it, if I seek it, if I want it and search for it and believe in it, home will again have an address. Someday it might include a wife and kids. But for now I’m happy to call home a phone call from someone I’m thrilled to catch up with. Home is an email from a friend, a Facebook notification that makes me smile and a song that makes me sing. It’s a place I’m always leaving only to arrive at again.
The characters are as varied as their geography, but the sense is the same—that optimistic feeling that starts in the stomach and reaches for your smile. It’s a deep breath that you want to hold onto forever, a sigh slowly exhaled filled with soaring feelings words will never corner or encapsulate.
I write these words sitting next to my sister, who will be driving home to Bismarck tomorrow, across the couch from my brother, who once chased a nurse down a hospital hallway yelling, “Bring back my little brother!”
All these people and places, discovered, known and yet to be, combine to create a world that also feels like home, a place that on a good day is everything you need it to be that shades life with a humbling gladness.
Tonight, I am at home. Tomorrow, I will board a plane and find myself here again.
