The first thing that hit me when I rolled my suitcase out of Reagan National Airport was that it was fall. Not in the sense of it being October, but the fact of the biting breeze, the trees that were not quite red, but were beginning to catch the light differently.
I knew that visiting home would be strange. Coming back home from any trip is strange and searching–everything is slightly off, shifted a few degrees–until we settle back into our routines and our lives.
Something in me surged as the monuments of the D.C. skyline rushed past my car window. This was not strangeness, but rather, something magnified. It was the knowledge that this was a place that I loved, but it was no longer a place I lived. That there was no time for the strangeness to wear off, because I was leaving in a matter of days.
The Potomac disappeared behind my dad’s car, replaced by mailboxes and yellow-green lawns and precisely planned neighborhoods. I told him about college, about my friends, about my classes. I was not the same person I had been two months before. If he noticed this, he didn’t say anything.
As we rolled down my street, I noticed that my neighbor’s driveway was crowded–boxes, stray pieces of furniture, family members. My dad mentioned that the matriarch of the family had died, so the kids were selling the house. A few weeks later, he told me over the phone that they were gone.
I walked up my basement stairs, echoing as ever, and greeted my dogs, neurotic as ever. My mom told me they had gotten a haircut a few weeks ago.
Should dogs’ grooming habits disturb anybody? Probably not. But all of the sudden, something in my stomach flipped. While I had been gone, the leaves had begun to change. My neighbors had moved out. My dogs had been groomed.
I texted my friends that I was home, but over the past two months, I had missed out on everything that made somewhere a home. I was a part of the changing of somewhere else’s seasons one thousand miles away, but not of the ones I had grown up with.
I adored visiting home. I had never been so happy to see the Popeye’s at which my best friends and I always ate, the white-lighted grocery store, the gas station I had taken pictures of for a photography project once.
But before you visit, you have to prepare. It is a large, encompassing joy to greet old friends, inanimate or animate, but don’t expect everything to be as you left it. Home misses you, but it doesn’t pause as soon as your airplane wheels disconnect from the runway. The world is turning under your old haunts as well as your new ones. It is scary and daunting to be directly faced with the process of transitioning from one home to the next. Change is something that feels bigger than all of us, sometimes. Visiting is an opportunity, then, not visit where you came from, but the place it has become in your absence.
As I watched through the airplane window the city below me be replaced by layers of cloud, all I wondered was what color the trees would be next time I saw them.