All These Places

I lived the first half of my life in Huntington, West Virginia.  A large part of those years were the angsty teenage years.  So I can’t really be too surprised that when the time came, I ran away with all that I had. 

                In the years since, I have returned only for short visits, and then gone back to a place far away…and then even further away.  I had good friends in Huntington, and parents that I loved very much.  And I never faulted any of them for choosing to stay there.  But I knew it couldn’t possibly be for me.

                You see, there was this train whistle that I always heard from my childhood room.  There were times, during high school, when I would hear that whistle and literally feel like my heart was going to jump out of my chest.  It seemed to be telling me that everything was going to be OK because I could leave; there was more out there for me.  I never really thought about where ‘out there’ was but I was comforted nonetheless. 

                And then, this past July, I returned to West Virginia from Colorado.   This visit was different.  I wasn’t a child returning home to my parents; I was an adult with responsibility.  My mom was in the hospital and my dad and I were taking shifts staying in the room with her.  So that meant that each evening I would return home to an empty house, the one that I had lived in since the time I was two years old, the one that never knew much silence in the memories that I had.

                Those nights I listened for the train whistle but heard nothing.  And I was relieved because this time, I didn’t know which way I would want it to take me.  For the first time, I was seeing my hometown as an adult rather than a restless child.  I was seeing it through the eyes of someone who had seen a lot of the world and could finally recognize that this town had provided a gentle cradle for my youth and a strong mold for my adolescence. 

                I cried when I was in the Huntington airport that July, not worrying about the strangers that surrounded me who saw my tears as they called for my departure.  Every time the sliding glass entry door opened, I caught a whiff of the rolling green hills trapped in the humid air and realized I still thought that there was something else “out there”.   And I’d spent years looking for it, drifting to places far away, calling them all ‘home’ at some point.

                But that July I started to wonder if I was searching for the wrong thing.  I began thinking that I needed to start with what was “in here” rather than “out there”.  And the best place to start was right back at the beginning, at the place that I first called home….the place that would always be.