Fall break is just around the corner and masses of Houghton students will sojourn home for a few (we hope) homework-free days. I love going home. It is the only stress-free place I can escape to outside of school, where I can find homemade chili and overwhelming amounts of blankets and actual, real alone time. I was not one of those kids who were excited to leave town and move on to bigger and better things, who could care less if they ever saw any of the same old faces again. I did not spend my senior year of high school itchin g to shake the dust off, to turn my back and run. I spent senior year actively pretending that graduation was but a myth. Freshmen year at Houghton was one big conscious refusal to refer to my dorm room as “home.” Every break I would rush home at the earliest possible moment, not bothering to say goodbye to my friends and hardly talking to them while I was gone. Even as a kid, I would never let my parents send me off to summer camp. It got pretty ridiculous, but home was the place I loved to be.
Coming to Houghton wasn’t the first time I had left home, though. I was born in northern Indiana and lived there for four years before moving to Orchard Park, where I lived for a two years before moving back down to central Indiana. These moves were consistent and concise. We never lingered in one place for too long. I always had my parents and brother with me. Really, nothing changed.
We stayed in central Indiana for six years before my parents divorced. I moved to Long Lake with my mother, this time leaving behind not just a house, but half my belongings and half my family and all of my friends. I didn’t make things easy on myself. I insisted on calling Indiana my “true home.” Rather than exploring my new town and meeting the kids I would go to school with, I spent my first summer in Long Lake sitting indoors writing letters to my friends back home and talking to them on the phone.
As you probably guessed from my over-the-top reaction to leaving Long Lake to come to Houghton, things eventually changed. My visits back to Indiana became shorter and less frequent. I felt less and less connected to my old friends and to the things that went on there. I formed incredible bonds with the girls in my high school in Long Lake and grew more there than I probably ever would have, had I stayed in Indiana. The transition became fairly easy, actually. Indiana was always there, waiting for me—I never fully had to let go. I could have moved back in with my father whenever I wanted to, and in fact I considered it once or twice. I also thought about going to college in Indiana and living at home before I settled on coming to Houghton. And still, on breaks, I bounce back and forth between Indiana and Long Lake, keeping in touch with all of my old friends.
The transition to Houghton has turned out to be easy so far as well. Long Lake is but a (five hour) drive away. I still see most of my high school friends on breaks. And I’ve had wonderful experiences here at Houghton. But college is an accepted transitional phase of life—I came here with the expectation that I would learn and apply myself for four years and then move on. I do not think about my home in the same way. I did not move to Long Lake thinking to myself that it would be a nice place to be for high school, but afterwards I would move on without a second thought. I do not think that way about my bedroom at home, my friends’ signatures on the ceiling tiles, my mother. With the impending certainty of graduation, my time in Long Lake will come to a sudden and screeching halt. It is a small town. There are no jobs available. There is no going back.
Home will constantly be changing, and quite often sooner than expected. How was I to know that things would escalate so quickly, that the last time I would spend more than a few hours together with my brother would be when I was twelve, that after leaving for college I would see my cousin maybe once more in his life. Missionary kids are tossed between countries for their entire childhood and then greeted when they return to the States, “Welcome home,” home being a place where they have never lived or had any contacts beyond their conservative grandparents who think they dress strangely, and their weird cousins. People say ‘home is where the heart is’ as if to assist in choosing a singular place to belong, but when the people and things and places that I love are scattered to the four winds, ‘home is where the heart is’ seems more like an impossible puzzle than a reassuring mantra. In order to manage the fissures of my “homes” throughout my life, disconnection becomes necessary between the home and the heart. My heart is in my father’s house. My heart is in my mother’s house. My heart is in the house of my education. My home is wherever I am.