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You Can't Go Home Again

Yeah, I read the Thomas Wolfe novel for a high school class. I think the title is all I retained.

My wife and I are back in PA visiting my mother, siblings, and their families. Our daughter will be joining us.

The building has been sold, so if home is the building I grew up in, then yeah, going home again would be trespassing.

Long before the building was sold it was renovated multiple times so as to be nearly unrecognizable. Traces of my occupancy have been long gone. So if the surroundings were home, that ship sailed a while ago.

No, of course home is the people. But I left home roughly four decades ago, so the people both are and aren't the people I grew up with. My mother suffers from memory loss and my siblings have found their destinies by and large since I left home.

I love my birth family, but home is with my wife and my children and the folk I work with. Being with them is being at the home that I created since I left PA four decades ago.

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