I left home about six years ago for my first semester at Redlands University. And really until this Summer I feel like I’ve been gone since. Christmases, a summer, and a few days here and there I’d return home – always feeling like I was bursting out my skin to get back to California. Rarely was I ever present when I was back with my family. I look at it a couple ways: I was young(er), and like most young men given their first taste of freedom I was enamored with it. The other derived from the shame of consciously fucking up and running with the lie that all was well. Not exactly something to be proud of I’m very talented at lying to others, but awful at lying to myself. I don’t let go of guilt and tend to bask in it anytime I’m alone. I probably lost a few years of good sleep over it. But when the wheels came off and I headed back to Connecticut a couple of months ago I finally felt like I’d truly come home. The culmination of a wayward journey west, that I hesitate to call mistaken for how grateful I am to have met some of the people I did and the experiences it brought.

As for the quote above from Frost’s poem The Death of the Hired Man – which is well worth devoting the few minutes it takes to read – it is a conversation between husband and wife when a former worker that burned the two of them has reemerged into their life. The man is not their kin but has opted to come to them and not to his real family. ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in’  is stated somewhat mockingly by the husband, as he wants nothing to do with the hired man. But the wife’s response ‘I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve’ I think to be a great explanation for the question of what home truly is. It’s easy to get into the mindset that home is a begrudging agreement between blood. But I don’t want to look at it like that – and in my recent experience it is not that way. It’s a fine place to be after you lose your mind for a little bit.

What’s changed in the two months though I’m not sure I can define fully without sounding corny. I’ll just say it’s been the recharge I’ve been needing for a long while. Watching baseball with Ma and drinking whiskey with Pops, long days of manual labor that keep me out of my own head, helping out with the grandparents, sewing the fields and tending to the cattle – it’s good to be home.