Briefly: The Time You Call Home
I’ve been thinking about home lately. More importantly, about how I can never go home again.
Now, to be fair, I can always go back to the place I’ve called home, in Ohio - but I can’t go back to the time I called home, if that makes sense.
Home, to me, is a gathering of lightning bugs in the fields (I haven’t seen a lightning bug in years…).
It’s grass buried beneath a thick blanket of snow (we’re lucky if snow sticks around for a couple days).
It’s sitting on a shitty plastic bucket and going fishing with Grampa in the pond (RIP, 2012).
It’s the hum of a little CRT under the loud Wii Sports music (Dad sold the Wii and everything with it, at least, Mom was sure he did).
It’s watching old as shit Pokemon movies with Ashley (Mom hated her parents, so we couldn’t be friends anymore).
It’s picking blueberries out of the giant blueberry bushes behind my grandparents house (One of my aunts took them when Grampa died).
It’s wetting the bitter reed on my tongue (My teeth are so fucked that I don’t think I could even play a woodwind instrument without pain).
It’s beating the heat with homemade ice cream (Dad took the recipe - and the old as shit ice cream crank he inherited from his mother - in the divorce).
Home was when everything was more simple. You didn’t have to worry about taxes or the price of gas - because you didn’t need to. We were kids.
I think I understand a little more about why nostalgia is as persuasive as it is. It’s a yearning to go home.
But you can’t. You can never go home again.
And maybe I don’t need to.