.: a leaning towards center :.

It seems the littlest things make me miss home lately. A small beagle with a raincoat on... a movie poster by the door to the tiniest theater... children at soccer practice in a field that I drive by... even the tempature of the evening air can draw my mind back home. And it's not even the sort of draw back home that I used to feel last term at Regent. It's just the calm reminder - even so much as a play to my memories and yearnings - that this place is not forever. This place is not even for the majority of my span on earth. Nor is my abode a hundred miles south of here. And that's the crazy thing, that I am starting to discover that when my heart warms over at the sight of something random, yet strangely familiar, it's not speaking to my wanting to be back in Mount Vernon as much as it speaks to my longing to finally be "home". A place of invitation... a place of stories and laughable memories... a place of friends and family... a place of calm amidst the history of storms... a place where I belong and have importance and a role to play in both action and silence.







"You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden, even though you have some place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone. You'll see when you move out, it just sort of happens one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this right of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." - G.S.