Going Home Again

 Going home is like reversing time: an impossibility but one of nostalgic longing.  It's like asking for the past to be undone, for routes to change, and for life-altering, crushing, and defining events to be discolored and morph into another reality outside the bounds of reason.  The mode of memory is one path to traverse, as memory and the past rarely work in a straightforward, linear manner. A moment wrought in angst can evolve into a window of petite clarity and a hunger for more.  Life is complicated and non-linear like that. 

In July, I spent a week back in Seattle, as I'm from Tacoma.  I've always felt more comfortable in the PNW than in most places, ironically enough, and altogether, I was there (in the region) for about two weeks.  Along the way, as I exited south, I stopped in Tacoma.  Curiosity consumed my soul, and a part of me needed to reconcile some lingering emotions from a youth lost in time and legal tangles.  I drove, taking in the shoreline and marina, which is teeming with boats and almost gleaming in its expanded glory.  The pub up the block from our old homestead on A Street is now a Walgreens, which I found ridiculously funny.  My Dad spent a reasonable (or perhaps unreasonable) amount of time there, once upon a time.  Standing in line to purchase water and gluten-free candy, a middle-aged man kept looking back at me with a mix of recognition and humor.  I pondered how poetic it would be if it were a boy from my elementary school, but I didn't take poetic license and ask him his name.  I let the dark-haired man, purchasing his beer in the hours before noon, walk away as I exhaled, trying to maintain my standing on my feet.  

Tacoma was taxing.  

I gazed long and hard at the old house, the wood siding replaced with vinyl, the blue my Dad had painted long since turned to a fading tan.  A rocking chair sat on the front porch, and I exhaled so long I thought my lungs might collapse.  My mother always wanted a porch with a rocking chair; she had a swing in Kentucky, and the Virginia house did have her rocking chair for a moment years ago.  I think a storm took it out . . . or dry rot.  The working-class Tacoma neighborhood still stands, with the maroon house across the street--with those boys that my brother used to hound and threaten to leave me alone--and the sidewalk I learned to ride a bicycle still remains.  The cherry blossom tree, which I've long loved in memory, stands bushy and larger than life.  My brother once used it for his teen escape, and these days it would serve as the perfect portal for a teenage escapee in the attic bedroom.  I started school on that front walk. Mom and Dad brought me home there when I was born. Dad used to line it at Christmas to make it glow for us, and the list goes on.  

Pike Place Market. July 2025. 

Along the Skyline Trail, Mount Rainer National Park. July 2025.

Yet, the course of memory will fail the fantasy as I couldn't avoid knowing that the pains of mental illness were already creeping into my brother when we were young. My parents battled their own elements; life did not unfold as planned.  Depression, PTSD, and alcoholism permeate those pages of my story.  As I stood looking at the old house, the first of two my parents owned, I exhaled and whispered to the dead air, "I hope the new family is happy here as we were not." Driving away felt like admitting and remembering the truth of reality all at once.  

Memories of bicycle rides, the wild family of boys across the street (in a house that I think hasn't been touched since we lived on the block), trick-or-treating, and friends over for dinner fell away to the long, summer day as I drove away.  

The church we used to attend is still there, but it's no longer the same.  At all.  The courtyard reeks of urine, and transient encampments have changed the landscape.  Reality of economics and life colors that city in ways we can't morally pack away.  The meth clinic . . . I need not say more. 

Being home again was good, as it always is.  I ate my weight in huckleberries,  always remembering why I rarely eat blueberries on my own and get a little sad at the thought of them.  When we played all summer, those things grew like brambleweed.  We picked at and ate as we tumbled through childhood days riddled with imagination and an era lacking sunscreen mandates and bottled water.  Even as Tacoma, and the side of town we called home, left me slightly bereft, voyages of my youth fueled the lining of my soul.  Olympic National Park and the peninsula were filled with my hiking wonder and memories of Girl Scout camping trips. These are the things that join the memories of waves and rock you to sleep at two am.   

Later, my travels took me back to Oregon, where I lived for a summer in 2016.  Looking back, my summer in Corvallis was everything I needed at that moment.  The universe has a way of serving us delight sometimes.  That was the summer I spent splunking archival documents on food and breweries.  It was also one of the last before we found gluten to be a rude culprit for me.  I rented a lime green bike and pedaled around town and campus, soaking in the air and sights while finding myself settling down.  My nervous system was wrecked from life and a series of events that left me in survival mode and barely hanging on.  The green grass, mountains, and elongated rides gave me a new sense of self that year. 

The view in Corvallis.  This time without Limey. 

This year, as I wandered downtown, I saw how the 2019 floods affected the downtown streets and businesses.  The lingering aroma of mildew hung in some areas, with water stains still faintly there along the walkway.  Shops are gone, some remain, but the foot traffic is far down, and the ambiance that dances in my memory from Limey and me that year (the bicycle I rented) far outshines in their glittered memory.  The yarn shop closed during Covid, I think, and my favorite of the coffee houses is still there.  Yet, the je ne sais quois of the moment has passed.  Perhaps that was what was wrong with Tacoma . . . or maybe it was never there.  Tacoma's challenges aside, the glitter of memory does not always hold up to the test of time.  

Leaving Corvallis, I sighed, remembered bike rides and some water adventures in the Willamette River.  The wildflowers were still in bloom, as they had been greeting me along the drive since I'd started my six-week voyage.  It's as if they were symbolism of the journey and memories of life gone by wrapped into reality.  Spoiler alert: they were, especially if you've ever hiked Skyline Trail in Mount Rainer in late spring or summer.  Elements of my personality seep from those peaks, and they certainly keep rising up at various spots along the way.  

Organ Mountains.  Las Cruces, NM.  August 2025. 

 My final visit home this summer landed in Las Cruces, NM.  I earned a master's degree there before obtaining my three letters in New York, which is a fact most people forget or choose to ignore.  Once, a couple of decades ago, I called New Mexico home twice.  Cruces in so many ways is the way it was back then: a mid-sized city, emerging from the desert plateau with an oasis for breeding desert rats and el camino lowriders for elongated nights on the strip.  While in Cruces, I spent a couple of years basing my days around the Organ Mountains.  I'd rise early in the morning, read, and drink coffee in those towers.  Later, I would run in the early morning light with those peaks looking down at me, and at night, I felt like I was perpetually looking for the last glimmer of light to speckle the air around them.  Not that the sun's movements fully guided mine, as insomnia has always lived within me and I'd be up at all hours . . . in my twenties, notably, as anyone past the age of 32 fantasizes about one day with the energy of our twenties.  Man, what I could get done in those hours . . . 

As I bemused on social, I woke to those mountains and lay down to those mountains.  When I was running, I still focused on the view in my memory.  The hike, one of many, took about an hour.  I drove from campus up to the ranger station parking lot, doing that trek multiple times a week.  Typically, I trekked it alone, and a few times my old friend Peter went up with me.  We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and talked about what life was, would be, and is (as we always said).  He pondered then, as others have, why I was single.  Pete always chipped back with "you're you, though.  It's gonna take someone special and groundbreaking." I've always shrugged those comments off and tucked them away, forgetting them most days, growing annoyed when someone quips it again (almost always after having asked if I'm with someone, since I don't broach the subject).  These are the good memories.  There's more, but most I keep to myself.  Even here.  

Sonja, the Seattle friend, and I had countless dinners at The Phoenix.  I say dinner, as it was lunch, but the leftovers lasted for dinner.  Sometimes into the next day.  So much food for 3.99 USD, and we never knew how they stayed open.  They've closed now, about a decade ago, and the strip is mostly empty.  The weird burger place is still there (how?!), but the landscape and feel are the same yet different, and so far away.  Looking back, Cruces was always a temporary home.  I enjoyed New Mexico with the dry landscapes and glistening mountain horizons, yet it never settled me or my soul.  Most places haven't been, to be honest.  

There is something to be said about going back, back home, and seeing what once was.  For me, memories of family, siblings, and youth idle alongside the traces of mental illness and complex relationships that I still don't articulate out of self-preservation versus hatred.  The power of heading home is for the poetic, I would say.  It's comforting, but it certainly is discombobulating.  Dad's bar is a Walgreens, friends have aged, grey hair replaces the brunettes and auburns of our youth, and the colors of houses change with the old memories there hidden away waiting for the onlooker to remember.  Only those with a key can enter, and all who do aren't always welcome.  Yet, the comfort of the past enables the present.  Ironically, in proper form or not, dreams from a youth faded to adulthood paved the long roads to winding roads, mountainside hikes, bear sightings, and long resolute nights with silence and stars dancing through open curtains.  The silence of it all, the romance of doing it all alone, seeing my past and present converge, are the lessons of conclusion, then.  The ending is never complete, as the legacies we leave--unknown and known--have a way of surfacing and rekindling memories and flames.  Yet, a drive through the heartland and along the Pacific coast can remind you of dreams left behind and of those still on the horizon, just beyond the sun's daily glow.  The only path is to move forward and continually carve your next memory on the way there.