We turned on one of my favorite movies ‘Good Will Hunting’ and I had memories flooding through me. I moved to Wenham, MA, in 1996 just before my 16th birthday in 1997. It was a 30 minute-ish train ride to Boston but the drive, by car, could take hours because of traffic. The scenes of them on streets crowded by buildings are seared into my brain because I was there and I saw it. I remember driving them in my 1990 Passat that the sunroof leaked from if I forgot to shut it all the way. (I once forgot to shut it completely during a snow storm and that was a huge wet mess) I remember walking the streets of Cambridge with my friends when we were so full of energy and life and willing to try anything and wanted to know everything and were so desperate to grow up.
I also remember how lonely you could feel in a big, bustling city like Boston. People were all around you but you were kind of alone. The TV show Cheers was hugely popular, and as I am older and maybe wiser now, it makes sense, because sometimes we want to go where everybody knows our name in a world we can feel forgotten and unloved.
But it also made me think of how I ended up where I am now in Herington, KS. If someone asks me where I’m from I can’t give them a solid answer. I say ‘do you want the long or short of it?’ I usually get a confused look so I launch into : I was born in Maryland, then we moved to Minnesota, then Kansas, then back to Minnesota. Then we moved to Switzerland and Germany and then back to Minnesota. Massachusets middle of sophmore year of high school, Colorado the middle of my senior year of high school, then all around Colorado until I moved to Wyoming in 2012. In 2018 I ended up back in Kansas during my midlife crisis to finish college two weeks after my 20 year HS reunion in MA.
And most people are stunned. Because that’s a lot of moving. Never mind all the houses/ apartments/rentals/hotels/ whatever that came with those moves. And all of the boxes.
When I made my final move to Kansas I found a random box we hadn’t unpacked since our move back to the states in 1992, unopened since we lived in Switzerland in 1990. That was fun, though, because random memories can actually be kind of neat.
I guess the point it boils down to is that it’s nice to feel home. We can spend so much of our time and lives trying to create something and build something bigger than ourselves, but maybe the whole idea is being ok where we are, trying to make a better place where live now.
I have lived in a bunch of places. I have seen and done a lot, and I’m tired because of it, but there’s nothing like the feeling of peace that you get by being content where you are. Dream big, fulfill those goals, but at the end of the day know your efforts made the world a better place, wherever you land. That’s my wish for everyone as we move in to 2024.
