Where is home?

Where is
What is
home?

I went to my high school homecoming last week, and found myself searching the crowd for faces I recognized
--from Ann Arbor.

In my little town, the place where I was born, I know the curves of the roads, the places where the deer run, the paths where, if you look at just the right moment, you'll see a creek or a cabin hiding in the woods. I know the farms and houses of families that I grew up with. I know the tree where the cross-country runners would throw our shoes from seasons past, and the fields where you could catch beautiful sunsets during an evening run.

And I used to know the people. It was easy to wave at them as they drove by because I knew who owned what car, and who would be coming home from practice at what time. In a town that could be Anyplace, USA, it was the people who made it worth going to a homecoming game.

Some are still there, but in general, as it always will, the people have changed. The family resemblances are there, like characters in a soap opera replaced by a look-alike for this week's viewing, but only a few know me; to a few of the older crowd I'm simply a faint remembrance of that girl who was always out on the field with her camera.

And yet in THIS town, this city, with buses and sidewalks and one of the largest university's in the state, I now feel more at home.

I know more people. The signatures of my hometown will always be ingrained in my being; I could no sooner remove those memories than I could remove a limb. But this town is familiar. I know its faces, its voices, its moods, its character. Its characters. And even though I still (and may always) feel that I am in some transitional state (after all, isn't that what life is?), right now, this is home.