I Go Home

So, let me begin at the beginning. Michelle, my old baby sitter and the sweetest woman on the planet, got married last weekend in Sarver, PA, where I grew up. Sarver is about forty-five minutes outside of Pittsburgh, but it's not a suburb. It's country. Country like cornfields and woods that don't end in developments or warehouses, forests that just keep going, that you could get lost in. Rolling hills and sweeping views, winding roads and open spaces. I can't even really describe how it felt to be back there, remembering so many little things I thought I'd forgotten, seeing how things have changed and how they haven't. Same with the people. It's a better homecoming than when I go back to Philly. And it felt more like home. It felt like, "this is where my roots are, this is where my feet are planted even though my head is everywhere else, including the clouds." Sure, it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, the "boonies," you might say, fondly referred to by myself and others as Pennsyltucky. Sure, my parents don't live there anymore, but I wish they did so that I could run away from the city sometimes and steep myself in the way that it used to be. Because that place was real, it went on forever, there wasn't as much bull shit. It was just simple. Real.

Part of me really wants to know about this whole other life I could have had if we'd stayed there, if we hadn't moved to Philly in 1997, if we'd stayed in the house my father built with his father in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of the woods. Who would I be? Would I know what I was missing, or would I not be missing it at all? Or am I missing it? Is this me missing the life that really mattered?