HOMECOMING

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Cosy in the Winter

This passage from Hal Borland's SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS perfectly describes both Evie and my emotions upon returning home from a brief or extended trip.  We always enjoy our visits or travels but nothing compares with coming home.

"More than half the pleasure of going is in the return, as any traveler knows.  To go, to see the far place, the place beyond the horizon, is exciting; but to return is satisfying as few other things can ever be.  To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

Few of us are that kind of traveler who can be at home forever away from home.  The new, the strange and the different have their lure, but one needs a place to call his own.  One needs to belong somewhere, to feel the roots, however tenuous, of identity with place.  Home, we call it, whether it be a room or a house or an apartment, a farm or a plot of grass or a well-known street or park.  Home, where one can feel and touch and see and find comfort in familiar things.  The place where one belongs.

Man, being man and an ambulatory creature with a degree of restlessness in his blood, must be up and gone from time to time.  He must go, if only to assure himself that the horizon has no boundary.  He must move from here to yonder, if only to know that he is neither slave nor prisoner.  What are hills for, if not to have a father side?  And what is the purpose of that distant rim of sky if not to lure a man beyond his own small orbit?  But once one has gone, one must come back.

And that is the final satisfaction of a trip, whether it is a vacation or just a journey -- the return itself.  The homecoming.  The trip back, and the home at the end.  To go is good, but to come back is best."