Quiet Moments

Home is all about the quiet moments. It isn't about exploration or adventure, it's about long familiar walks, stopping to listen to the wind in the trees.

There are certain people that feel like home, people you can be quiet with, who's lack of conversation doesn't make you feel like a burden.

It's always strange to walk the same streets you've walked your whole life and find something missing, or something new and interesting. It's even stranger to see the people you've known all your life and feel as though you've grown apart, you no longer fall into the quiet comfortable rhythm of just existing together, you have to put in the effort only to feel like two puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together anymore. Then there are old friends who you no longer even greet because even though you know each other, you’re strangers.

Home is a cup of tea, the leaves falling, rescuing worms from the sidewalk during rainstorms, running barefoot in the grass. Home is love, and childhood, and good books. Home is losing your slippers when you most need them and having cold feet in the winter. Home is growing old, and losing loved ones, and broken objects.

There’s a song by AJR called Don’t Throw Out My Legos, it’s about moving away from home for the first time and leaving behind part of yourself, about moving away and not moving on. It’s difficult when you’re young to ever think of a future where you’ll one day be a guest in your own home. It’s one of the hardest parts about growing up. Wishing for there always to be a place for you, imagining a time when you’ll have to sleep on the couch every time you visit home.

Someday you’ll have a new place to call home, to make memories in a new house, in a new town, with new people. One day you might drive past your childhood home, and it’s like an old friend that you don’t quite know anymore. Someone new is living there, new people to call it home, and you’ll wonder if they ever made the same connections to it as you, or if to them it’s just a house.

When I left for college it felt like a new era in my life. An era that ended very quickly once Covid cut my first year short. It was eye opening for me, when I was a teenager I always wanted to pack up and move far away and do incredible things with my life. And being back home I suddenly felt this clarity that I would rather stay in my hometown doing the things I love to do surrounded by the people I love, than anything else. I always have trouble explaining to people my plans for the future, because telling them that I’d like to be doing exactly what I’m doing now for the rest of my life confuses them. “Where do you want to live in the future?” How do I tell them I’d be perfectly content to buy a house just around the corner from my childhood home and live there happily for the rest of my life?

Home is the two dying maple trees on my parents’ front lawn, and the pride flag that whips a little too hard in the wind, and the ice shapes that my mother has been working on for weeks to add to the snow wall in the yard. Home is baking cookies a little too often, and ice skating with my grandparents even though it hurts my ankles and I don’t have fun. Home is laughing too loud, and loving too much, and living.

Home is what makes me the happiest.