Home for the Holidays

As I'm writing this, I'm in the house I grew up in. I am spending time with my family for the holidays. It's always strange for me being home. Maybe because I've lived somewhere else for so long. I went as far away from home as I could get to go to college, and then I went even farther away for law school. I lost touch with nearly everyone I knew here. In a way, it seems like just last week I was sneaking in the door late at night, hoping not to wake my parents. And in another way, it seems like this is not really the same place I lived in at all. I mean, this is the same house, but the kitchen and both bathrooms have been re-modeled, and there is a lot of new furniture. Only one of the houses in the neighborhood contains the same family that it did when I lived here. They put in new, brightly colored play equipment in at the park a block away. They are about half-way finished demolishing the auto-body plant that I walked by every day on the way to school, picket-lines and all. Kids I used to baby-sit for when they were three years old are now juniors in college. It feels like I somehow fell asleep for ten years, like Rip Van Winkle.

But at the same time, it can't be that strange. I mean, throughout this post, I've been calling this house, this place I am now "home": a place I haven't lived since I was eighteen. They say, "Home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in." I didn't have to come here. I chose to. My family's here, and I wanted to spend Christmas with them. If "home is where the heart is" (sappy though that saying is), then I guess my heart, at this time, is here with my family. As it should be at this time of year.