Home

I wrote this a few months ago, but the question is still here, and so is the blog draft...

As many of you know, I've long had quandaries with the concept of "home." (What is it? Where is it? How is it attained? What does it look like?... those minor questions.) This weekend, I went home to visit my family out in western Pennsylvania. I hadn't seen them for something like a month and a half, and I needed some good Cameron farm air.

Being that I was only home two days, my time was mostly given to social activities: hanging out with my parents, visiting my sister, eating with my grandmother, saying hello to everyone who still attends the church I grew up in. Probably the most fun was church--I mostly just helped bake cookies, which involved hanging out with a couple of completely adorable 5-year-olds (and one really bratty one), and getting lots of hugs and smiles.

The social activities highlighted to me the importance of people in community. Many of the people in my church have known me since I was 5 years old (or longer), know my habits, my strengths, and my most embarrassing stories. They remind me that my life did not, in fact, begin with college, but that I have a twenty-year long history of being that cannot be ignored. One of the beauties of this kind of community is that they do remember your history, even if sometimes this vagrant forgets it.

Wendell Berry, darn him, makes me wonder if I should feel obligated to return to my home community. There are issues of family land and history, but the biggest reason of all is just people living together. Thinking of moving back to Punxsutawney always scares me--those who know me don't understand me, and there are very few, if any, in all of Punxsy who could understand a hippie liberal Mennonite pacifist. A part of me thinks of it as my responsibility, as a member of that community, to return to it and use what I've learned there. But this is a hard thought. Those who have known me best for the past five years live elsewhere, and the thought of leaving that community is scary. If I stay in Harrisburg, there are at least some folks who can get me and my theo-philosophical idiosyncrasies; in Punxsutawney, they'd all look at me and ask what the heck I just said.

So, the questions remain.