Home Is.

I was in California over the Labor day weekend, visiting friends and my old life in the bay area. One afternoon I was lying on a wood deck, staring at the clear blue sky, with the yellow-gold bay area sun washing over me. Ro was running around the deck, playing with apples that had fallen from a tree. Doors and windows to the house were open, the air inside and the air outside diffusing into each other. Someone was playing beautifully on the piano, the sounds boldly spilling out on to the patio through the open sliding door. And I just lay there - quiet, alone, and at peace with that moment, thinking "This is what I envisioned my life would be like". At that moment, my heart felt at home. I had a sense of calm that I hadn't had in a long time and I wondered what it was about.

They say Home is where the Heart is. But they never point out where your heart is. We often associate this heart as being where the people you love are located. In my moment of peace, I was savoring being my myself, the music, and the air. The only person near me was Ro, and he undeniably brought sweetness and love, chasing apples and calling them "baa(ll)". Then there were the apples themselves. My neighbors at my old home in Mountain View had an apple tree and its apples would fall into my yard. I never ate them, but for many seasons I watched Kuttu harvest these fallen apples and feast on them. His happiness was so simple and pure.

Lying there on the deck, with just the sunlight (and sometimes shade) and the fresh air washing over me, things felt as they should be. In Austin, except for a few perfect days in January, the weather doesn't afford me the simple luxury of leaving my windows and patio doors open. We have giant windows across an entire wall of the living room, and most of them haven't even been cracked open since we moved in. We clean them, we drape them, we sit inside of them in our by-turns air conditioned or heated house, never knowing what the air outside feels like. And perhaps, never wanting to know for a majority of Texas days.

Oddly, this momentary glimpse of my perfect sunny afternoon didn't happen in a house I knew. We were tagging along with our friends to visit their cousins, people we had never met before. I was in a house owned by strangers, where 50% of the people who were there at the time were strangers, and I was walking around thinking "I could live here". Or perhaps "I should live here".

All this makes me wonder where home is. Is it where you grew up? Is it where something significant happened in your life? Is it the last place you had that one fleeting moment where you felt your life was perfect? Can you live your lifetime knowing you are not home? Can you live your lifetime knowing you don't have a place that feels like home because something refused to fall in place? Do you stop worrying about what is home, and live in your house because that is where the people are? Going back to what was once home stirred up a million questions and emotions in me.

I miss living in an area where you can send your child to a private school which doesn't have a name starting with "Saint". I miss living where the air is crisp, the sun is golden and the mountains are a short car ride away. I miss my old friends, I miss commuting on my motorcycle in the carpool lane. I miss the millions of interior Indian food offerings, instead shushing myself up with fatty chicken tikka which has come to represent Indian cuisine here. I miss hopping on my bicycle and riding fifty miles right out my door, on tree lined streets that rolled up and down the foothills. I miss driving down to the beach and drinking a hot cup of coffee, getting away into beauty in one short ride. I miss the effortless gardening, my giant hybrid roses and my vegetable patch.

But what will I miss if I move back? I won't miss the Austin heat. I won't miss the water holes and lakes because I hardly ever go there. I will miss being able to step out without a backup sweatshirt in the middle of July. I will miss the nicer roads (Mopac is a dream compared to 101 or 880), my green commute along Hwy 360 with no sound barriers to look at. I will miss my friends, people who helped me settle in and because of whom I eventually got past the stage where I was ready to move any minute. I will miss my juicy beef filet, the acres of greenbelt behind my house, the lower cost of my house which leaves me with enough to spend on my hobbies. Mostly, I will miss the people I love, trading one set of ties for another. The only other big deterrent to moving back stems from practicality, where you trade in your low cost life for a high cost one. But I won't necessarily miss the giant yards and square footage of Austin. I've lived in a 50-year old house before, and I can live in one again. If that is where home is.

Like every trip I have taken to the bay area so far, this one also left me with a lingering sense of disquiet. An awareness of what I have lost, an awareness of what it will cost to regain some of it. Like every trip I have taken to the bay area so far, this one too will fade from memory. The nostalgia of what was and the possibility of what might have been will lose their clarity. Like every trip, I am reminded of what I am missing, and dream a dream for myself. This time, my hope for myself is that one day, as I am sitting on my own patio, surrounded by the people and dogs I love, windows open or shut, piano resonant or quiet, I manage to close my eyes for a minute and feel like I am home. And that in that moment, I will feel no surprise at my sense of belonging, but a comforting knowledge that this is how it has been and this is how it will be.