Day 143 - Home

312 Dudrey Court, Moorhead, MN, aka home

I noticed when I was in Iran that I started to think differently about what home meant. Instead of home conveying warmth about where I was currently living, I realized that I thought of home as the place I wasn't, the place I came from. I realized that when I lived in California after graduating from college, I thought of home as Minnesota. And when I traveled back to Moorhead from California, I thought of California as home. So it wasn't surprising when in Iran I thought of both Minnesota and California as home. Minnesota would always be my home state. And I expected to return to San Francisco. I went to Iran expecting to stay there two years, so it would never be home. But when after 15 months I traveled back to the U.S. on vacation, I surprised myself when I found myself thnking of Tehran as home. It happened both in Minnesota and California. I found myself talking about returning to Tehran as returning home.

Shellagh and Bill in my home in Tehran, Iran

After Iran, there was Romania, another place I hadn't expected to stay long, another place I knew I wouldn't ever consider home. So California and Minnesota were both home to me during that year. But while I was in Romania, California voters passed Proposition 13 which changed the way school districts would be funded. And the immediate response was for schools to stop hiring teachers. And that meant my return to California was no longer likely. Instead, after a few weeks in Minnesota, I was hired via a telephone interview to join the staff of the Center for English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a one-year appointment, although I thought I might be able to remain there at least a few years. But Minnesota remained home during my stay in Illinois.

After Carbondale, I ended up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, back in Minnesota. And while I was there, I only had Minnesota to think of as home, until I joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. Now I was in a career where home was always going to be somewhere else. Minnesota would always be my home state. While overseas, home would be the District of Columbia metropolitan area.

An incident in Germany during my first tour emphasized this for me when one of the women I met there told me I looked familiar. She was a soldier, so I didn't think we had ever been in the same place at the same time, but I rattled off the list of places I had lived and when I lived there. We didn't find anything in common through that list. But then Lisa, another woman in the conversation, mentioned that she knew I had lived in Arlington, Virginia, for six months while I attended orientation and language classes at the Foreign Service Institute. The soldier asked me when and after I told her, she said that is where she had seen me. While she was stationed in DC, she had a part-time job as a security guard at one of the FSI buildings. She had seen me as I came and went each day.

The view from the kitchen of our home
in Arlington, Virginia

I learned a lot in that conversation. I learned that being in a place for a temporary period, even if only for a few months, doesn't mean it wasn't home. And I learned that it is all too easy to walk by someone every day without seeing. I decided that I would never do that again. I would look at the people in my life and I would see them, not look past them.

For the next 25 years, home meant three places - the one I was in; Washington, DC; and Minnesota. Then in August, we sold our house in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to San Diego. So many years had passed since I thought of California as home. I'm learning to think of it as home again. But a bit of my heart is still in Virginia, in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. Minnesota will always be my home state. And someday maybe California will again feel like home.

Living Room in El Cajon