Home Is Where The Heart Is...
Tomorrow Alec comes home from MSU. He left on August 20 for SMB Band camp, so it will have been 2 months and 9 days since he last walked through the doors of what for 18 years was his "home". In the past two and a half months we've made some changes, little ones mostly...a new rug here, a new rug there...a subtle cleaning of his room, and a big change in the downstairs bathroom. What I want to know is, will he care?
A million moons ago, when I came home from college for my first weekend visit, I know it felt weird. It felt like I was "home", but kind of like, I didn't really belong there anymore. The place that had for so many years defined me, as "me", was somehow not the same. Looking back, I had changed, mostly. I remember asking myself was "home" now my college dorm room? I'd like to think it wasn't. Because, lucky for me, "home", where my parents still live, is the same home I grew up in, and came home to. My parents continue to live in their first house, on the street I grew up on, in the house I remember growing up in, only a couple blocks from my own house now. Tomorrow, I will want to shout at Alec when he notices the changes, "this is STILL your home. It always will be." And you belong here. Man, I missed you.