The Small Town of Home
Ethan Tweedie Photography
“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.” - Benjamin Button
I'm sitting here in my art room. Staring out the window of our second story apartment; in our small little town, on the Big Island of Hawaii. When I look out in the evening at the house lights up on the hill, I have a feeling of a memory, of a life on the East Coast or someplace like Seattle. I have never even been to Seattle, but I was born in New Hampshire.
I dream of lighthouses and stormy nights with homes overlooking the ocean. It’s an odd pull, a calling that I'm unsure of where it comes from.
I have a feeling of a different place that I long to live someday.
Waimea can feel like a town completely removed from what one might fantasize Hawaii to be like. It's a quaint mountain town, 3,000 feet above sea level. It's a place where the winds blow cold and the rain drops daily between the blue skies and sunlight. We put up with the rain for the rainbows.
I grew up in this town. I graduated from one of the only two private high schools located here. Waimea has always felt like my true home on the island. No where else did.
I've experienced a different self living here as an adult. I'm not the same person that I was when I grew up nor when I left. I have gained 10 years of life around the world. Living in the continental USA, Australia for 4 years, traveling around Europe and Bali.
I have had experiences that have aided tremendously to my growth. They will stay with me forever. I bring all of that back with me to the town I was raised in. It's a new me in an old town. I've found that nothing here changed, I did.
Coming back, I was immediately reminded of all the reasons why I left at 17. It was a sobering moment after moving back, when I realized that the life I once lived here wasn't perfect (grass is greener syndrome is real), and it is nothing of what I imagined it would be this time around.
It's been 16 months since we made the move from Australia to Hawaii. We planned to give it a year. Some say it takes two years to settle down and feel adjusted. Psychology tells us it can take up to 4 years. It took me that long to feel like San Diego was home during the 6 years I lived there.
Yet, during the hardship and challenge of adjustment, during the night's spent longing for my old home in Sydney, things where I am start to become familiar. A calmness about where I am is present. There's no telling how long it can take to settle after an international move, leaving everything I came to know behind.
Not to mention a culture and lifestyle that is the polar opposite of what we moved to. Maybe it is simply such a stark difference in "place" that it has felt harder to just "be here".
The good news is, I can write about it. I love writing for no other reason than to write.
We will move forward in the best way we know how. Since for all of us, all we really have is right now. The past is in the past, and it is unknown how long the grief from the move will last.
Tonight, I'll leave you with my favorite quote of all time:
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” - Scott F. Fitzgerald