What Hasn't Changed?

Lately, I have been focused on all the changes around me - how it feels to live through them, to experience them almost on a cellular level. But today I’d like to consider what hasn’t changed. What holds us here like Gorilla Glue-what remains beautiful and peaceful - and what fills us with that sense of Home.

Perhaps the deepest feeling is that sense of home - the familiar: knowing what is in aisle 13 at the grocery store, where to park, who to call when the refrigerator isn't working, the backroads, how to prepare for a storm, what cherry tree blossoms first, and what chestnut tree shows the first signs of fall.

Underneath the often-thick layer of crowds and traffic, privet hedge and green giants- home still exists- the terra-firma that has been holding us here all along. The sun still sets over Long Beach, the tide still rises and falls at Havens, there are potato fields and farm stands, pumpkin patches and apple orchards, cinnamon doughnuts, sweet corn and the endless sea surrounding us.

There are roads less travelled and baseball games, picnics and fresh fish – live music, local musicians, and rainy-day books to read. I can climb the same granite steps up to the library and remember my young self-holding my first library card. I go to the window of the bank where I had my first navy blue savings book, I feel the footsteps of my ancestors on the sidewalks filled with seashells.

Grandads and grandkids are still fishing off of Long Wharf, ice cream cones and postcards and neighbors that wave when they drive by. There’s chicken soup, friends who remember your birthday and a local newspaper that celebrates life. There are hiking trails and beautiful trees and restaurants that never disappoint. My doctors know who I am, remember my name and ask about my family.

I often wish I had been born with the wanderlust that propels people into lives of travel and adventure, but somewhere along the way it seems to have flown from my saddlebag and left me quite comfortably in my own backyard. There are many interior roads to travel, books to read, birds to feed, people to visit. Each day offers a peaceful new adventure, free of TSA lines and boarding passes. Perhaps the best thing in life is to feel the peace of home, the wanting what you have, the inward journey offered by each new day. Sometimes the adventure isn't in going somewhere else, but in seeing more deeply where you already are.

The world changes. Home changes. We change. And yet there are places and memories and beauty that continue to hold us to this most beautiful place—regardless of crowds, regardless of inconvenience, regardless of change.

When we feel caught in the dust devil of a changing village, perhaps all we have to do is stop, look around, and remember what indeed hasn’t changed.

And perhaps, in the end, what hasn’t changed just might be what matters most.