Can I Call It Home Yet?

We've "come home" to Grand Haven for the first time, back from our visit to California.

There's something dreamlike about visiting what used to be your home. It's like when you take an unfamiliar winding road and come upon the backside of a familiar building. "This leads to here?"

I'm not used to flying into San Diego with fresh suitcases. I am surprised by which friends stick around and make a plan to see me while I'm there. I'm not ready for such long goodbyes from my
family and friends, who made the visit so worthwhile. I'm so thankful for relationships that hang on tight in love and stay in love no matter where I go. But as much as I love these people, I no longer feel the same in San Diego. Home is a place of familiarity and comfort, a place of second natures, not second guesses. My homeness in San Diego is fresh in my mind, lingering but ghostly, a reverberation of sound in a long hallway, a footprint in the mud that has hardened, a puddle after a rainstorm in which I see my unfamiliar reflection. It's the feeling of having something on the tip of my tongue, freshly forgotten.

And then there's something about coming (even though I hesitate to call it) home. Calling Grand Haven "home" feels like the first time you introduce your date as "my girlfriend". But pulling my car up into our driveway*, unzipping my luggage on my bed, cooking in my own kitchen (where I know the place of each utensil), resting without desire to maximize my time with visitees (you know, people I'm visiting back in California), climbing into my spot in the bed, these speak a language of comfort and familiarity to my body and I begin to feel home, even if I'm not fully comfortable saying it.

As similar as home feels, it is definitely different here. We have a real winter here and it's only begun. Much of our time is spent inside our warm home, and so is everyone else's time spent in their homes. My hope is to somehow get our friends and neighbors into our warm home with us. Or we can go to their houses. Either way, maybe we can all be warm and home together.



*Especially pulling in, turning the car off and then calling our landlord for help because we just realized it is twenty-five degrees outside and we are locked out.