I Left My Heart in Encinitas

My friend, Jean, was kind enough to let me stay with her since my arrival in Encinitas on Saturday evening. I’ll be with her until Monday, when I will be able to move into the townhome I’ll be sharing with the owner. Jean, who lives two-and-a-half miles from the area I’ll be living in, is also letting me use her Honda Fit. When I lived in Encinitas for five months earlier this year, I did not have a car. So you’d think that I would be happy to have a vehicle to tool around in.

Not so much.

Living a couple miles away from my stomping grounds and driving everywhere is a completely different experience than living where I want to be and walking everywhere. In fact, at times it doesn’t

Is This My Home or My Home Away From Home?

The weird thing about being back in Minnesota is that it doesn’t feel weird at all. Everything looks and feels so familiar that it seems like I’ve been gone for five days instead of five months. Encinitas feels so much like home that I didn’t know if there was room in my heart for two homes. Yep, there is. In fact, I like that I now have two places that feel like home. I have lots of friends in both places and feel like I’m part of the fabric of the community.

Palm trees and ocean beaches are wonderful but what makes a place feel like home is

Hidden Histories

A few days before I left Minnesota for California late last year, I was lying in bed in the basement of my mom’s house, the house we moved to when I was thirteen. I was looking at the photos and miscellaneous itms that adorned the walls, thinking that at some point in the future, another family would live in this house, with photos and mementoes of their own, and that absolutely everything in this house would one day be replaced by another family’s possessions, just as we replaced the family that lived here before us. The new family will know nothing of our family, of the years we spent in this house, or that we even existed. Just as the people living in the house where I grew up in a St. Paul suburb know nothing of our lives, and care not that my parents built the house they now call home.

I’m not the only one to have such thoughts. In her new book, Bird Cloud,  Annie

The Comforts of Home

Erin and me outside the Wisconsin cabin

After a week in the woods, I felt more at home in a friend’s cabin in northwest Wisconsin than I do at my shared apartment in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for more than a year. I don’t view “home” as a physical concept. I feel at home anywhere I have an emotional or spiritual connection or where I’m with people I care about.

I felt at home in the cabin because of the peacefulness of the woods and the generosity of the couple who offered it to me. I felt even more at home there the last two days of my eleven-day stay because my daughter Erin drove up to walk the nature trail with me and spend time together.

I feel at home wherever I am if my daughter is with me. Or my mom. Or my closest friends. I feel at home at Ecopolitan, my