There’s No Place Like Home

The bittersweet of returning home

Dear Reader,

When the holiday has reached its end, and the alternative life we’ve been living must transform back into an ordinary pumpkin, returning home is bittersweet. While a part of us wishes to stay forever carefree, indulgent and pleasure-filled, it is home — with its small sense of routine and rhythm — that sustains us.

Here, a hui hou is spoken unto dear ones departing. It is not goodbye, but rather, until we meet again. It is a semi-colon in place of a period, an implied promise that this is not the end but a pause, a rest stop in the timeline of love. And so, we bid a hui hou after half a month in some of our favorite company. We kissed cheeks and held small ones close, praised and affirmed and expressed our gratitude. Then doors were shut and precious people piled into cars.

We return to our casetta full time, to the land and its long grasses, to the cats and goats who’ve felt our absence. We restock the pantry and remember how to cook for only two. We mow. We clean house. We tend to laundry over-due. I spend a Sunday afternoon sleeping off the last two weeks, and the evening pulling weeds in the garden. Across the ocean, a plane lands and sleepy children are carried to their beds, suitcases are unpacked and clothes are tucked back into drawers. Tired parents are finally reunited with their own bed.

The bitter is in the parting, in the being separated when not so many generations back living all together was the only way. But in this temporary dream land, the nightly power struggle of crowning Kitchen Matriarch, the wholesome collaboration and competition of jigsaw puzzling, and the orchestration of after-dinner cleanup is a novelty. The sweetness is in having our cups filled and settling back into the lives we’ve chosen for ourselves, renewed and reminded why home is ultimately where we belong.

We’ve been careful to craft a life worth returning to, my husband and I, one whose sweetness quickly overcomes any of the bitterness felt from having to leave the beauty and pleasure of other places behind. While we often crave and itch to stroll again cobblestone streets and sip one and a half euro cappuccino from a corner marble tabletop, we are met daily with our gratitude to be here now.  In our little house unfinished, with a to-do list unchecked, with the land and animals and businesses to tend, it’s a life imperfect but it’s the one we have chosen and the one we thrive in. When you create a life you need not escape from but can retreat back to after time away, with all of its responsibilities included, it makes the ordinary pumpkin still feel like magic.