The Best Part of a Trip is Coming Home

The Boston Globe

He has to prod me to go. It's been this way all of our married life. I've attributed my reluctance to pack up and go anywhere, any time, to genetics. His parents emigrated from Scotland and England. They left all they knew to come to America. My parents moved from Somerville to Randolph and spent the next decade shuttling the mothers they left behind to and from our unfinished Cape for every birthday, holiday, and tiniest celebration. Packing up and leaving home is in my husband's genes. But it isn't in mine.

That's the story I have always told myself. That's the story I have always believed.

Until this trip.

I've been away for 18 days. I didn't think I could bear to be away for so long without my kids and their kids and my friends and my Wednesday nights at Club Cafe and all the other crazy things that are routine, that you can give up for a week, maybe two. But 18 days?

Back when I was newly married, when it was just the two of us, before children and grandchildren and life's escalating responsibilities, my husband whisked me off to the Caribbean, to California, to Bermuda — travel his passion and his profession.

I remember calling my mother from all these places, feeding pay phones with quarters and dimes, happy to be away on adventures with my new husband whom I so loved, but part of me, too, a big part of me, missing home, missing I don't remember what now. But missing it. Aching for it.

After our children were born, leaving home got harder. Even in the earliest days, when I had both a mother and a mother-in-law vying to watch my infant son, I didn't want to go where he wasn't. What place could be better than where I was? I held the Golden Goose in my arms. There was nothing up that bean stalk for me.

It is many, many years later now and that goose flew the coop decades ago. All my kids are grown. There is no reason not to go wherever the road may lead. Still, 18 days seemed way too long a time to be away from home. And yet I went. I left. And the Earth kept on spinning.

I didn't pack until the night before because I didn't believe, what? That I could leave? That I would? That this planned vacation would actually happen and not be upended by something unplanned? Or is it simply and truly that I didn't believe, didn't want to believe, that home, my family and my friends, could exist without a little help from me?

They did. And they did just fine. The snow started falling two days after we left and it hasn't stopped, and from half a world away I've worried and felt guilty that I wasn't home to help. What will the kids do? How will they get to work? Who will watch their kids? How will they manage? Do they have food and what if they lose electricity and what if, what if, I said to my husband as if our children are children, still. As if they are not full-fledged, competent, completely capable adults.

I texted and e-mailed. Stop worrying, they wrote back. Shut off the computer! Enjoy your time away. They took selfies in the snow. They took pictures of the snow drifts. They measured the snow drifts and e-mailed pictures of nearly buried yardsticks. They called the plow guy for us. They shoveled our walk. They wrote and said, "Stay away! Go somewhere else! It's Snowmageddon!"

"Enjoy your time away. Stop worrying." My mother used to say the same things to me years and years ago when I would call her from some distant place.

I did enjoy my time away. Lazy, beautiful days. Good food. Someone else to make the bed. A chocolate on my pillow every night.

But no matter how perfect away was and no matter how cold and stormy it is here, no matter how I know they can get along without me, it is always so good to come home to home, and to them.