Two Homes

Living in college is a weird thing, especially when that college is so far away from your other home, the place where you grew up. You live in one place for a couple months, and then another, and then you go back to the first. It's strange, and it feels strange each time you come and go. You never even entirely know whether you actually want to leave.

And then, when you get to wherever you were going to, it feels as if you've never left it, until you remember that really you've been living hundreds of miles away for months.

Pretty much all of you already know this, of course, but I'm from Cape Cod and go to school in Vermont. Burlington. I adore both. They're both crazy amazing and crazy beautiful. They both have the things that can seem hard to live without.

Burlington is living with your friends and going out every weekend. Cape Cod is family and seeing friends only when cars and schedules can make peace with each other. Burlington is city and walking everywhere. The Cape is nature, but nearly always needing to use a car. Burlington has its brick, Victorian houses. The Cape has its white, centuries old farm and captain's houses. Burlington has the waterfront, with layers of pristine mountains shadowing behind it. The Cape has the ocean and never ending clouds. Burlington has trees with leaves that turn so gold, you can see their color glowing even against the navy night sky. Cape Cod has pine needles the color of rust. They're impossible to rake, so they stay strewn across most everyone's lawns, poking through the light snows, until spring. They make good additions to magic potions when you're little.

Sometimes, it seems like if these two different homes were able to blend into one, they would make something almost perfect.

I wonder how it'll be when I go to Ireland. I'll have three homes, then. Three different kinds of fantastic not-quite-perfection.

(Except, I'm sure, Ireland really will be perfect.)

(This is coming out to be a really muddled post, but it's kind of a muddled thought, too, I think.)