Coming home

Don't get too excited; I'm not back in the US of A just yet. I'm back in Parma. Six hours on four trains from Nice and I was wondering what home means. I have met people who say they are from nowhere, or everywhere, and not understood what that meant. In recent years, life has given me a lot of homes, each one farther from the one I first considered to be such, and I am starting to understand.

I was coming back to Parma, furrowed fields zipping past my window, and I was bouncing in my seat. But I was also worried. Worried that I might have forgotten Italian in this month of not speaking it. Worried that I might open my mouth and have French come out, instead. When you've been in so many countries you never know what language might escape your mouth when you bump yet another person because you forget to compensate for the backpack that makes you double-wide. But back to the issue: what is home?

Coming home is hearing a language you thought you'd forgotten flowing forth from you, as though you'd never left. Because home never left you. Coming home is being embraced like someone who is not a guest and, after being warmly welcomed and even more warmly fed, people going about their evening's activities, because life is just back to normal. Nothing special; you're home now. Coming home is knowing the streets under your feet and the language in your ears and saying my how things have changed but knowing it is still the same. It is still home. And it always will be.



Homecoming number two in T-4 days.