All my life, I have been an enthusiastic traveler. Starting at the age of two, when my parents, grandmother, 1-year-old sister and I drove from South Dakota to Oregon and back, I have been all about what lies over the next hill. (In fact, I was told that on that inaugural trip, I sang "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" non-stop through the Rockies.) I never understood the kids who were homesick at Girl Scout camp, or when visiting distant relatives. Where was their sense of adventure?
I credit this to my father, who was the same way. I asked him once whether he had ever been homesick, in his travels or his stint in the Navy, and he said, "No. Wherever I hang my hat is home." (Which in retrospect is pretty funny, because he only wore hats when the temperature was below zero.)
That's why an experience I had this September was extremely disorienting.
Dad died this summer, and in September my sister and I took his ashes back to South Dakota for burial next to our mother. I have not lived in South Dakota for 35 years, and I had only visited there a few times in the early years of my absence. Not only have I never longed to return there, I have scoffed at the articles naming Sioux Falls as an ideal place for retirees to settle. Had those writers ever visited the area in the winter? Did they have any idea how difficult it is for the elderly - particularly the very elderly - to avoid being homebound in a state with copious snowfall and almost no mass transit? I didn't miss the winter temperatures, the summer mosquitoes, the wind that never quits...you get the picture. But...
A funny thing happened as we drove through the countryside toward Sioux Falls. As we passed the seemingly endless lines of cornfields, the pastures of Hereford and Angus cattle, the farmhouses huddled into windbreaks, and the piles of alfalfa hay bales, I started to choke up. Sioux Falls itself had paradoxically expanded far beyond my childhood boundaries while simultaneously shrinking (12 blocks to the mile there, as opposed to the 8 blocks per mile where I live now). I still have no desire to ever move back there (the snow! the mosquitoes!), but something deep inside me felt that I was coming home.
I take this as confirmation of the research showing that the brain loves the familiar. I would previously have said that for me, home is where the people I love are; but now my most deeply loved relatives are all buried somewhere in South Dakota. For both reasons, maybe Sioux Falls will forever be my emotional home.
I still don't ever want to move back there.
Going home must be like going to render an account. ~Joseph Conrad
