We’ve been in Johnson City, TN since yesterday visiting friends and checking up on our house here. It’s always a bit strange to return to a place where you’ve once lived after being away for a while.
I find that in reality everything is a bit smaller than in my memories. It’s as if the dimensions become exagerrated the longer I’m away, like the tales your parents tell you: “I walked barefoot to school two miles in the snow, uphill both ways.” Everything seems familiar but it’s as if someone rearranged things while I was looking away; old haunts are gone, a new WalMart and Starbucks have sprung up, the kids at the college look really really young.
I suppose the only place things are somewhat static is in our minds and flashes of memory, but in reality the world keeps moving and things keep changing. Many of our friends here have become parents since we’ve been away. When did we all become grown-ups?
The passage of time is blurring the edges of my memories and they are fading, becoming snapshots instead of home movies. The memories are becoming more like feelings about an event or time period than the event or time itself. Will the feelings eventually also fade into just an impression about something?
It’s said that you can never go home and I think there’s truth in that. I’m sure the disorientation I feel returning here will be even more pronounced when I visit Seattle at the end of the month. The hardest part for me is that I’ve now lived so many places, everywhere but where I am at the moment becomes somewhat mythic in my mind — I’m finding that “home” is not the constant that I thought it would be.
Perhaps we’ll get to stay still for while with this next move to Virginia.