I didn’t spend my first weekend completely alone in my childhood home until I was twenty-eight years old. Bizarre, I know, that it took that long, but there was always at least one parent and/or sibling there when I visited, and before college being “home alone” usually meant a few hours, not an entire weekend.
I pulled up to the driveway late in the afternoon, car running on fumes, probably no more than twenty bucks in my pocket. Things were tight before my fall semester paychecks started up again in a week or two.
Yet I was happy in that moment. The stress had slowly left me, as it always did, decreasing and decreasing the farther away I drove from New York City and my hot apartment that was somehow depressing in the early September sun.
I got out of the car and relished the peace and quiet around me. The silence was stronger from knowing that the house was completely empty; my parents were away for a couple of weeks. I was, as they say, “killing two birds with one stone” with my visit: house-sitting plus weekend mini-vacation. What was different? The more time I’d spent in New York, the more I had started to appreciate the tranquil corner of New England where I grew up. The nearest big(ish) cities were about forty-five minutes away.
That afternoon, I went out to the supermarket to pick up some fresh food. Even driving around the denser commercial area, with vast stretches of parking lots surrounded by thin strips of green, and storefronts ranging from dingy to renovated, I still wondered–what was different? I had seen these places hundreds, thousands, countless times. Always in the background, but now more vivid.
While sitting out on the back porch with a book, the answer came to me. I was seeing this place without the usual source of comfort attached–i.e. my family. It was as if the buffer was stripped off and I could see where I grew up exactly as it was, without my close-knit family’s presence as a lens through which to see it. And I liked what I saw.
Was it perfect? No. Safe, quiet, friendly? Yes. Home, still, in a way? Yes, especially considering that New York was feeling less and less like home, if it ever was. My sense of appreciation for where I had spent my childhood grew exponentially that weekend. All I had to do was shift my perspective. Growing up I’d sometimes complained–it was “so boring” and there was “nothing to do”–and couldn’t wait to get to New York or L.A. someday.
Fast forward x number of years, however, and I was taking every opportunity I could to get out of New York, even just for a day or two. In New York I was suffocating, but out on that back porch I felt limitless.
Note: I first wrote this well over a year after I’d left New York, and it originally appeared on Suite.io. The site has since shut down, but the post comes to mind regularly enough (especially when visiting family around the holidays) for me to want to re-share it.
