Going Home and Other Musings

So, I just traveled for 20 hours with three children to the wilds of Indiana, my homeland and place I both dread and love. The week I left to come home was a big one, with the loss of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett in the same day. One of my friends put it best when she said that the death of MJ was pretty much the signal of the death of the childhoods of my generation. Since my childhood is kind of what I like to recapture when I visit here, that made me a little sad.

Being me, I have been overthinking all the things that have changed about the place I grew up. My first night here, I spent a couple of hours laughing until I nearly wet my pants with my dearest friend Amy (you can look for an entire post about her here, if you wish). On my way back to get the kids from my mom's house, I passed my grandparent's old house. They lived there from the mid-1940s until their deaths, in 2001 and 2008. A strange car was parked there and it really hit hard that I would never attend one of their famous Wassail parties at Christmas, when they entertained more than 100 friends. I'd never sit by my Nana's bedside and listen to her wise words - she had polio and was bedridden her final years, but never had one negative word to say. I'd never make mischief with Pop, who made it clear I was the favorite grandchild and didn't care that the fact of it upset people. I had to pull over because the tears made it hard for me to see.

My childhood is indeed over, and my children's childhoods are going far too quickly. I look at them and wish I could start over - be kinder, let more things go. I often wonder if visiting their own ancestral home will be a happy trip. I certainly hope so!

I am going to enjoy my time here as much as I can. I tend to be a different person in Indiana. I think it's the logical way the cities are laid out, the expanse of cornfields, the friendliness of clerk and driver alike, the slower pace. My mood is different, more calm. I am a person people want to talk to, and don't cringe when I speak like some do in Massachusetts. I tend not to dwell on the horrors of my real life, and I make my plan to escape back here someday.

Sorry for the maudlin tone. I hope to regale my very few readers with some funny stories. There is a person I would love to see, but want him to mostly remember me as a cute 22-year-old and not the fat girl I have become. I don't know if he will read this, but he knows who he is, and I hope he will intitiate a meeting because I am too scared. I guess you can't really ever go back!

Anyway, off to bed after a long night swimming and enjoying time here in the Hoosier state.