There’s No Place Like Home

“There’s no place like home…There’s no place like home…”

In the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz, these magic words returned Dorothy to her home in Kansas. She awakens with her family around her, and attempts to recount the fantastic events of her travels to Oz, complete with new friends and menacing villains. Her family nods and smiles, content in the knowledge that nothing ever changed for them. Whatever happened to Dorothy “out there” doesn’t matter at home. Never did. Never will.

Countless songwriters, novelists and philosophers have discussed the issue of “going home again.” Heraclitus asserts that “no man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Recently, I was invited to return to the neighborhood of my childhood. Forty years passed since I roamed the streets selling Girl Scout cookies, trick-or-treating, or riding my bicycle to the neighborhood grocery store, yet the map was indelibly etched in my memory. Why did I wait so long to return?

Later that day, I met a cherished friend at a local restaurant, and viewed photographs I had never seen. As she requested, I signed and discussed my novels at the neighborhood library. The audience evoked a gamut of surprising emotions. I stared into the faces of the people from my past: the people who bought my Girl Scout cookies, the parents who filled Halloween pumpkins with trick-or-treat candy, the kind and generous souls that attended my mother’s funeral. Even after forty years, the ashes of my past smoldered in the hearts of these friends and mentors. Their genuine smiles, gilded with the gold of true friendship, glowed with the affluence of shared memories. Time could not dissolve this bond.

The legendary Hero’s Journey cannot exist without the passage of time. Time is our universal constant. The road to self-discovery is hard won and genuine; the heroes, villains and angels of our dreams travel the same roads. Until one returns home as a weary traveler of fortune, the Hero’s Journey is not complete. Though I was undoubtedly not the same person, I dipped my toe into the river and a piece of “self” emerged. Like Dorothy, I returned to my “Kansas.” As I discovered, there’s no place like home.

See my latest interview with Catherine Rankovic on the “About Claire” page

— Claire Applewhite