Home

Where we love is home, Home that our feet
may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

Today, a friend asked me how life is in Boulder. I told her that aside from a little bit of vertigo and the stress of a start-up, things are great. We love the skiing, the hiking, the girls' school, our neighborhood, the people we've met so far, the people we've reconnected with by moving here...the list could go on and on. Then she said, "It must be starting to feel like home." Home to me these days is wherever Toby, Evie, Lucy and Noni are, but I don't think we've lived in Boulder long enough for it to truly qualify as our "home". It takes a while to settle in to a place and to me "home" implies that your roots run deep in the ground. By that definition, home to me is still one of two places - either a wooden house at the end of a point in Shelburne, Vermont or a brick house on a tree-lined street in Frederick, Maryland.

I've been thinking of Frederick a lot this week. Maybe it's because the Christmas cards started rolling in and so I am glancing at everyone's smiling faces everytime I walk in or out of the front door; maybe it's the thoughtfulness of the package that arrived for Noni today from a friend; or maybe it's looking through old photographs to find a picture of Adam, since Evie was writing a report on him and his job at the African Wildlife Foundation, and reliving so many memories as I flipped through the photo album. It's probably all three mixed together with the lights that are going up around town, reminding me of downtown Frederick this time of year, the Kris Kringle parade (even though those memories generally consist of trying to prevent freezing ballerinas dressed as snowflakes in cotton sweatshirts try to avoid frostbite), and all of the holiday parties with friends.

We won't be going back east for Christmas this year. The next time we plan to visit Frederick is next summer. I'm so excited for my family to come visit and am frankly happy not to be packing bags of presents and loading all the girls onto a plane or in a car, but I do miss our friends.

At school, Lucy made a paper kite with a string tail. She was supposed to write on it where the kite would like to go. Hers reads, "Lucy's kite would go to Maryland" and she drew a picture of our family in our old house on it. If only it were that easy. It would be nice to grab onto the kite and fly back for a day, to enjoy some mulled wine and home-brewed beer with friends, to exchange holiday wishes and hugs, and to walk through Baker Park and then downtown to see the lights.