Lessons learned, part 1

So we are home, though slowly learning that "home" is, at least for us, a relative concept. We are back in Medusa, glad to be in sunshine, thrilled that it is warm enough to happily boondock at our now closed store in upstate New York, but feeling pretty unmoored.

Glad to be near family, but looking forward to being on the road again.

We left with a clear objective - not only did we want to see a bit of our country, and share it with our curious, passionate and occasionally unruly tribe of children, but we wanted to find somewhere that was doing better, whatever that meant. And there are places that seem to be thriving - we stayed with a friend east of Nashville, always enjoying his company, a slice of very good pizza and a night under the stars. It's booming there, the locals tell me. And we shared brownies and cookies at a bakery in Highland, Illinios, where the proprietor tells me that folks always bounce back - Highland is rather miraculous in that regard, I guess.

And we stayed in Denver, with generous lifelong friends, where the tech bubble continues to expand. Denver and Boulder are hopping, too, it seems.

But for the most part, we traveled through hundreds of downtowns in small communities from here through the midwest and back, where boarded up buildings and empty storefronts were the rule, not the exception. Where there's a Harmony, Indiana, bursting with energy and optimism, there are ten places like Dumas, Texas, where Walmart seems to have overtaken the culture, color and spirit of the region.

Thrift shops galore, and thousands of auto parts stores, gloomy abandoned strip malls. Lots of farmland, not many farmhouses. And cows, always lots of cows.

Really, we have been left with far more questions than we have answered. How can there be so many people who seem to be barely making it, so many folks who remember better days - can describe them in colorful details - but when queried about the future, have only the sparest of optimism? Why, too, is there so little room for alternatives to conventional ways of living? Why must we all settle down into jobs and commit ourselves to a bit of geography, when there's a whole world out there?

We are pretty convinced that some of it has to do with a quote we heard when visiting a fantastic museum in Manhattan, Kansas: to paraphrase (badly) we are plagued with this beautiful and irrational commitment to place. Some places just call to us, and once we are hooked, we hang on for dear life. What, perhaps, many fail to realize is that, these days, the place we ought to holding onto is a whole lot bigger than a chunk of limestone hill in middle Kansas or a spicy, never-say-die burg in upstate New York. Maybe we just need to expand our concept of home to mean the country or the continent or the planet.

Can you imagine what our country, our world, could be like if we considered everyone a neighbor, if we treated everywhere like home?