This adorable ball of fur is my dad’s Australian shepherd puppy, Ronnie. She’s been my little buddy since Scott and I arrived home today to spend some time with my folks.
Home. Maybe because I’m all over the place and living in a different state what seems like every year, this house still seems like home to me. It’s not the house I was born in, nor the next house, nor the next house, but it’s the one where I spent the greatest amount of my years, the one where I did the majority of my growing up, the one whose doors I stepped out the last time with a backpack and a duffel bag on the way to adulthood and independence.
When I read Erika’s post on coming home yesterday, it made me reflect on those very feelings she described when Scott and I walked in the door this time. Adulthood came, but I still keep coming back home, and every time I do, I feel like not all that much time has passed at all since I stepped out the door the first time.
Things around the house have changed, but they’ve remained so much the same. The house is older and so are my folks, but they still enjoy sitting in their chairs in the living room and catching up over coffee. The cats I grew up with have long passed on, but there’s still a cat on the stoop to welcome you. And a puppy. There’s a lot more stuff, thanks to travels and gifts from children who go frequently abroad and souvenirs from their own travels, but I always remember the house being kind of akin to the Weasleys’ burrow – comfortably cluttered and cozy. One day, my mom vows to put everything in a POD while she redoes the house and only move in the things she wants, but that just hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think it will, but there’s no need for an intervention just yet.
It’s not the house or my folks that feels so conflicted between being the same and changed. It’s me.
Stepping through the front door feels like a time warp of sorts. Things that I’ve forgotten over the years get stirred back up and feel much more significant, attitudes I used to have about things come creeping back in, old questions emerge. I find myself being parented, fussed over, taught, lectured, praised, and everything else I was used to getting from my parents when I was seventeen and getting ready to walk out the door. It’s as if literally half a lifetime of independence, adulthood, responsibility, and the like happened in another world somehow, a parallel universe that I left.
There is a part of me that will always be seventeen again when I walk in through that door. In the past there have been times where I’ve had to take on heavy responsibilities in that house, and those times will come again, so for right now, I’m grateful for it. I’ll pick up adulthood when my husband and I walk out the door again. In here, there’s warmth, happiness, and my dad’s fresh-baked apple pie, so we’ll take that for now.
