Where is home?
We are repeatedly asked this. There is not an obvious answer. AliSun may reply, “home is wherever we are.” I have been calling Ojai our “home community.”
We have no house to return to from the road. Just a modest office-slash-storage space holding the dwindling remains of the way we used to live.
Having a home does have it’s appeal, but perhaps less appeal than it used to have. Last night, I missed having our own well-outfitted kitchen – the only room in the house I miss. I am more inspired to take a cooking class in Thailand than I am to prepare a simple dinner, which is an unintended consequence of perpetual travel.
(pause)
My name is called. I present my insurance card. Prick. The needle slides into my vein, blood is drawn. I never look down.
(resume)
Even if Ojai was more home than anywhere else, time flies past like George Clooney in Up In The Air. I have meetings, oh so many meetings, keeping the work pipeline full. We see friends and family, swap stories. There are doctor appointments, dentist visits, car maintenance, tax preparations, thrift store drop-offs, REI runs, DMV crawls. Note to self – schedule a checkup with the eye doctor. It feels like we squeeze a year’s worth of errands into the month where we’d rather sink in and decompress.
We have nine days in Ojai, three weeks in Ventura, then SBA-PDX-OGG. Five months on the road, the first month in Maui. Where is home?