Returning Home

And so today my African Adventure is over. Today I get on a plane in the heat of summer, twist and turn for 15 hours trying to get comfortable, and step off into the frigid air of a New England winter.

But in many ways this is not my African Adventure, and in just as many ways I am not returning home. Because this past year and a half has been our African Adventure and I have been lucky enough to bring my home alongside.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, home is a funny concept. Ask a child to draw home and they will draw a house, a nice solid building to represent home. As you grow, and travel, and lose the people who once made that house a home, you begin to realize what a tricky thing this thing called home is. That the feeling of home doesn’t have the reassuring permanence of bricks and mortar, and that it is not invincible against time.

In many ways I have been unfortunate. I face the prospect of returning home with ambiguity because the home I know is in the past. I haven’t lived in my home country in over four of the most defining years of my life, and I fear that we won’t be a good fit anymore, me and the good ole’ U S of A. In those last four years I have lost many of the people who made that country a home – the faces, smells, sounds and traditions of the home I knew so well are now gone.

And yet in so many ways I have been lucky. Because if, as we all inevitably do, I have lost the home of my childhood, I have been fortunate enough to have found someone who to me has represented home long before we walked down the aisle. And, unlike the solid building of a house, I get to take him alongside. I have been lucky because throughout this whole experience I have not had to feel alone. Throughout the traveling and the unknowns and the frustrations I have had my best friend by my side. And so I always knew everything would be okay. Because wherever we went, we were always home.

And so today our African Adventure ends and I am looking forward to returning to the country of my birth to see my family. As for finding a more solid foundation for this funny thing called home, well, that’s our next adventure.

Happy Anniversary Brian…it has been a surprising adventure.