Home

It’s always somewhat disappointing when a vacation comes to an end.  You’ve had your fill of fun, adventure, and relaxation, and with a sigh you turn your back on your temporary escape and march toward home.  Fairly quickly, however, you start to look forward to the comforts of home – your own bed and towels, your favorite mug, and your spot on the corner of the couch where you curl up and put your feet under a familiar throw.  “That was fun,” you say, “but it’s good to be home.”

Home.  As I reflect on our annual trip to the lake, I am preoccupied with thoughts of what “home” really means to me.  Having vacationed on a small lake in northern Wisconsin growing up, the water has always been a large part of me.  Some of my favorite childhood memories are wrapped up in a tiny cottage in the woods, with no television and plenty of time in the boat.  As I walked around the gift shops in a small Michigan town during our recent trip, I found myself drawn to a sweatshirt that simply said “HOME,” with the state of Michigan used in place of the “O.”  There was also a small heart in the middle of the state outline – I suppose home is where the heart is.  I’m not from Michigan or Wisconsin, but that setting, on the lake, with a slower pace of living, always feels like home to me. 

Is it possible for your “home,” in a different sense of the word, to be somewhere other than where you typically reside?  Is it possible, that even after you leave that place, part of you stays there?  I’ve always found it more difficult than it is with other vacations to end my time at the lake.  Even as a child, I remember walking out to the dock as my family packed up the last of our belongings, to get one more look at the water.  I would breathe in deeply the fresh lake air, recall the memories we’d made over the last several days, and reflect with a tinge of bitterness that all of this would continue to go on without me.  The water will lap up against the shore, for someone else’s ears to hear.  The bluegill will swim under the dock, to be tempted by someone else’s baited hook.  The loons will fill the silence of the night with their haunting calls, and I will miss it.  It wasn’t fair.  Why couldn’t I stay?  This was my home.

It's difficult for me to discern which came first – whether my childhood experiences helped cultivate in me a love for the lake, or if that connection was always there and our family vacations just helped me find it.  I guess the origin doesn’t really matter, but what I know for sure is that I resonate with that setting, that environment, and it has taught me about myself.  The first time my husband surprised me with a weekend getaway to explore southwest Michigan, I was quite simply in awe of my surroundings.  It felt like a magical nostalgic world where deep, rich, Midwest farmland met with a sandy beach setting that you could convince yourself belonged to the ocean.  Roadside farmstands and toes in the sand – this is the stuff my dreams are made of.  Lake breezes and beach time and screened in porches and fresh picked blueberries and small town bakeries.  These things make me feel like me.

I guess that’s why I’ve always had a more difficult time leaving those vacations behind.  The feeling I have when I have to head back to our real life is so much more than just, “that was fun.”  It feels like I’m saying goodbye to a piece of myself that is staying behind because that is where it belongs.  That’s where it feels at home.  I’m a farm girl who’s never lived on a farm, and a lake girl who didn’t technically grow up on the lake.  But I garden and tend to my flowers and relish each moment spent near the water.  When I stick my hands in the dirt, or let the sand run through my fingers, or wade into the cool, fresh water, I know who I am.  And it feels like home.