The Long Road Home

Last week, I went to my hometown for the first time in the thirteen years since I moved to Massachusetts. I never meant to be away for so long; that’s just how life worked out. The house I grew up in is gone…sold and torn down years ago. Certainly, that’s a big part of why I’ve never gone back.

Maybe it’s the upheaval of the last year, the rolling waves of dislocated friendship and community, the isolation of a world in pandemic and unrest…I don’t know. All I do know is, I’ve been homesick for the prairies and it was time to go back.

After flying into Kansas City for a reunion, I had one free day to do whatever I wanted. So, I packed my people in a car and we drove out to Higginsville.

I wondered if I’d even recognize the place after all these years, if I’d be able to find my way there. Well, it turns out almost nothing about my little hometown has changed.

We wound down the familiar roads, past all the same landmarks that dotted every day of my childhood. And there it was, just as I left it, Hearthstone Rd.

• 

Our long driveway is the one landmark I most hoped to find intact…and it was…just as I remembered it.

It’s not an overestimation to say that I worked out my faith and theology, who I would love and marry, what my dreams for the future would be, and much more all while pacing up and down this driveway. It now seems a sacred line of earth leading both to and away from home.

All those dreams and plans come full-circle standing here with the man I love (the man who I whispered those very words to for the first time in hayloft on this property).

I watch my children, immediately at home, chewing shoots of grass and gathering dry corn cobs from the field.

• 

• 

And I think of all the places I’ve been since I last walked down this drive. Paris and London and Rome. All the places that are not only dreams, but memories now too.

How much I’ve changed; how much remains the same.

• 

• 

When I left this place at 22, I was ready to go. I’d finished school and was about to get married and move to the East Coast just like I’d always wanted.

What I didn’t know then was just how hard it would be to find my way back. I didn’t know that I’d never again step foot in the house I grew up in or that the barns and apple trees would all be gone by the time I got back. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be halfway through my thirties with children at my side before I’d touch this ground again.

We all make choices — whether to stay, whether to go. And none of us can predict how the dominoes will fall once we set down a path.

I love the life I’ve lived and built these last thirteen years. But I think I’ve finally been gone long enough to understand what I left behind. Paris and London and Rome will never hold the memories in my heart like those of this dirt road.