Home. So many feelings wrapped up in this place. It's a place that feels so permanent when you're young, and becomes harder and harder to pin down as you get older.
Every summer back from college revealed a place that felt a little less like the home I remembered. The closer I got to leaving my childhood home for good, the farther away the sense of home seemed to get. The best childhood memories began to melt into a warm sense of nostalgia. The line begins to blur between old arguments and their modern iterations, leaving me with an uncomfortable silence.
After buying, renovating, and selling multiple homes over the last 10 years, my sense of home has become far more attached to my family than to a physical place. Yet, there's still a longing in me for that old feeling of "home". A feeling that always eludes me in fullness, but that I get tastes of in various moments. The moment I came home from the hospital for the first time with each of my children. That was a taste of home. The moments in which we sang Christmas carols with extended family after almost 2 years of pandemic separation. That was a taste of home.
C.S. Lewis refers to these moment as "pleasant inns" that are only tastes of the Home we will one day experience in full. I'm so thankful for the gift of these stops along the way, and the people I get to share them with.