It's not a feeling I experience very often and mostly it's
because, I wonder, where is home? I
haven't lived in the same place for more than 10 months since I left my parents' home. And
though I've been in Vail just shy of two years, I seem to move residences with
the season, and the transient nature of the community makes it seem like a new
place every year. You don't even qualify for local status until you've been
here nearly a decade, so I've agreed to call this place home-base, but
reticent to call it home.
Yet that is what it is.
Like most workers in a mountain ski town, I use the
off-season to visit friends and family around the country. I'm fortunate to get
to go to some awesome places, and I recently returned from New York.
It was beautiful. I went hiking through real fall leaves, the
kind that actually crunch under your feet and turn colors other than aspen
yellow. I canoed on a clear glass lake, ate an organic farm to table dinner at
a candle lit picnic table--yes, it was that ridiculously idyllic.
It was a great week.
But I was ready to come back.
I thought it was the trees I loved but in the forests of New
York, with all its dense diversity and canvas painted scenery, I realized it
was the mountains; they have a way of folding you in, holding your feet solidly
to the ground even when your eyes wonder up and up to steep crags, jagged
riffs.
I leave again today for Minnesota, where the scenery this
time of year is nothing, in comparison to last week in New York. In the flat
and open space between the small Midwest towns I'll drive through, I suspect
I'll miss Vail even more, and though I'll enjoy my time with my family, odds
are I'll harbor a thought with smooth content, the desire to come back home.
