“You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”
– Garden State
Of course being a Jersey girl, I have a special affinity for the film Garden State. Yes I can feel your judgement, and yes I’m ignoring it.
Something I wish I knew about college was this very idea of nostalgia that I now associate with coming home. My older brother has moved out, my mother lives alone, many of my high school friends stay at school during breaks, my mom keeps re-doing parts of our house and home just isn’t quite the same.
See the picture below for what it looks like in my memory.
For an idea of how it’s changed, that orange and yellow picnic table is in my basement, the siding on my house is white, I’m about 4x that size, and about nine of the trees in my backyard are uprooted from Sandy. Somehow it still shocks me that the back of my house isn’t blue anymore. That awkward moment when you don’t recognize your backyard; that’s how you know you’ve been away at college for too long.
Luckily for me, home is driving distance away and my mother has a limited selection of food she can cook, so every home-cooked meal is my favorite. (By the way Mom, you owe me a quiche).
Tomorrow my family is off to Connecticut for a cousin’s house-warming and our first home-cooked Thanksgiving since my father passed away. We’ll be welcoming in a house when we arrive, and we’ll have a new place to miss when we leave.
How wonderful it is to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. Happy Thanksgiving!