Curmudgeon's Corner

Back Home

Posted by Al Campbell on Feb. 15, 2010

People Making A Difference, Quality of Life

Back Home.

We went back home yesterday for a fiftieth wedding anniversary get-together.  Back home, in this case, is the relatively small community of Viroqua on Wisconsin’s western fringe.

We seldom make that trip anymore since both sets of parents are no longer living, but yesterday was one of those seldom-made trips.

I am always taken by the significance I feel when I’m back at the place of my roots with people I have known nearly all my life.  There is something about “home” that never seems, for me at least, to go away.  The friends and relatives and acquaintances are there just as they always have been.  The feeling is one in which it seems we’ve not missed a beat even though I haven’t lived in that area for nearly fifty years.

There is a good feeling about being “grounded”, about being able to return to a place where memories of simpler times exist, and where, or so it seems, the people haven’t changed much.  There is that feeling that you can pick up a conversation thread as if there has been only a day or two passed since you last saw and spoke with a person.

There is that feeling of self awareness as you see those who have aged coupled with the realization that you, too, have aged; except that the ‘drastic’ changes have come so gradually that you don’t realize it until you’re confronted with those “old” friends.

There is that special feeling that this is a place where you could still belong if you but chose to make that move.  There are those who are ‘suddenly’ eighty and ninety or more years of age and you are reminded of your own mortality…and of just how special those ‘old timers’ have become in your memory.

I went ‘back home’ yesterday and felt welcome there.  And, that was a very good feeling indeed.

Everyone should have a ‘back home’ to which they can return for a reality check.

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The Curmudgeon Blog today is titled "Global Warming Retreat?".