Driving West on I-84 in New York state, somewhere near mile marker 52, I catch my first glimpse of the mountains, and my heart tells me that I’m home. When I pass the ‘text stop’ on this section of road, I mourn the old terminology. There’s something about a ‘scenic overlook’ that acknowledges that the view in front of you is, indeed, spectacular. Worth putting down your phone, at the very least.
If you’re a local, you know that Shawangunk is pronounced ‘Shon-gum,’ but the correct pronunciation is irrelevant when referring to the mountains, which are affectionately called ‘the Gunks.’ I grew up in a place where names overlap, and it behooves one to know the difference between a town, a village, and a hamlet. I once tried to explain to my husband that the Town of Wallkill and the Hamlet of Wallkill are not, in fact, the same thing. When I tried to point out that the Hamlet of Wallkill is actually in the Town of Shawangunk, I’m quite sure he stopped listening.
I moved away from my hometown in 1997, and I’ve reached a point where that was more than half a lifetime ago. I’ve become accustomed to the quirks and foibles of a new place. I can easily navigate a rotary or direct a student to the nearest bubbler. I know how to pronounce Worcester and bang a uey and, much to my dad’s chagrin, I am a passionate Patriots fan.
I don’t go home very often. The reasons are myriad and valid but still a bit lacking. Truth be told, going home is so, so very complicated. Every time I attempt it, I encounter a barrage of unexpected emotions. And every time I leave, I am exhausted from the effort it takes to feel so many feelings.
My anxiety has helped me to pay attention to the cues I get from my body. I know what anxiety feels like. Anxiety is in my gut and my shoulder blade and at the base of my skull. When I go home, the feeling is different. It’s in my chest. And it’s not a tightening; it’s an expansion. My breaths are deep and my lungs fill completely and it’s like my body is trying to make room for all of the emotions that come flooding into my heart. Time slows down. In the moment, I can’t separate the feelings. They tangle into a knot, expanding and contracting as the positive emotions tug against the negative ones and my slow, struggling brain tries to keep up with the barrage.
The physical environment itself evokes emotion. There is the unsettling knowledge that I’m driving down a road that I could navigate with my eyes closed, and yet, off to the left, there’s an entire neighborhood that sprouted in my absence. I imagine the irritation of the driver behind me as I speed up around the familiar curves, only to slow to quickly at an unfamiliar traffic light that’s likely been there for a decade or more. The homes and the stores and the views have changed, but the earth and the hills and the roads still feel like a part of me. Maybe it’s a primal sort of response, but those mountains make me feel protected.
Tangled up with noticing the space around me, I’m also flooded with memories that bring their own emotions along. There’s a pang of regret when I realize that I don’t know if my fourth grade best friend’s parents still live in that house. There’s palpable relief as I recall the time I wrapped my car around that telephone pole and lived to tell the tale. I recall childhood bike rides with fondness and grieve a bit that my kids probably won’t ever know what it feels like to pack a backpack and pedal for hours to meet up with a friend on the other side of ‘town.’ Every turn, every scent, every change in scenery prompts a long-forgotten recollection and I wonder if this happens to everyone.
I think about my friends who still live here. There’s no way they deal with this deluge of memory on a daily basis; they wouldn’t be able to function. Does constant exposure create a sort of numbness? Or perhaps the act itself, the leaving, has created a response in me that simply doesn’t exist for them. Regardless, I look at these strong, beautiful, resilient women. I see their families and their careers and their homes and I can’t reconcile their growth against this background that my brain has relegated to childhood in perpetuity.
As I drive through this place, I feel surprise, regret, peace, and guilt in rapid succession. I wonder, for a brief moment, if all of these feelings are rushing back with an adolescent intensity because I have never been an adult in this place.
My visit is all I hoped it would be. I reconnect with old friends and it is truly joyful. These women help me to remember who I once was and to find her deep within who I am.
If I peel back the layers, I find a shy first grader waiting for the bus. I find an awkward seventh grader with her nose in a book. I see a clueless teenager who thinks she knows it all. I uncover a tentative twenty something writing lesson plans for her first classroom. I see a beautiful bride, optimistic about the future. A new mother, overwhelmed and exhausted. A tearful woman, making hard choices for her family.
This visit to my hometown was good for my soul. But as I drive back East on that same stretch of I-84, it occurs to me that ‘home’ means something different now.
Home is a small white cape with a stream running by. Home is a bunch of kids and too many pets and the comfort of my husband’s arm around my shoulder. It’s a community of family and friends and neighbors. It’s backyard barbecues and baskets of laundry to fold and boating on the lake in the summertime. Home is bathroom renovations and sick tummies and cuddling in front of the fireplace on a snow day in January.
This new home is the culmination of the experience of all of my iterations. And it is beautiful and messy and complicated and perfectly, purely, joyfully mine.