Home

Home means so many things. Home is, of course, the building where your stuff lives and where you lay your head most nights. It's where your children live and come back to someday. It's where you return to rest, reset, feel safe. It's your people. It is a feeling of peace and calm, and a sense of identity and a place you can most gently exist. And it's a thing you can lose and mourn and rebuild. 

"Outside" has always felt like home to me. I grew up in the woods, building forts, following game trails, sitting on the banks of ponds and rivers. Outside still feels most like home to me. It's the only place I breathe deeply, where time slows, and worries eventually drift away on the breeze instead of trapped inside my head. 

But like nothing else, I love the mountains! The mountains stole my heart from the first moments I spent in New Hampshire's Whites to my solo time deep in the rugged Montana Rocky Mountain range and every mountain trail and peak I've traveled since. But the Colorado mountains were the only mountains that ever felt like mine, which I realize as I type this is not the same as "home." With that said, until last year, since 2016, the kids and I have spent some part of the summer in the Colorado mountains, most often the Sawatch Range until we realized a dream and bought a house in the foothills of the Rockies. 

And as the new home where I laid my head came together, the home that was my marriage, my safe space, my comfort ended. Honestly, it had ended some time long before that, but I hoped that with so many other "homes" set right, the home in my heart would get better or wouldn't matter. Turns out the home where your heart lives is a whole lot more important than the home where you lay your head. And one couldn't compensate for the other.

I was lucky to keep a tiny piece of those mountains for a while, something small to satisfy the wild part of my broken heart. We still went "home" twice a year, I got to breathe enough mountain air to sustain me until the next time. I had a place that was still mine. My kids had  foothold in that part of their life and that held them over too. But it isn't home any more and we will likely never go there again. It's time to sell that last piece of "us" and move on the rest of the way, but I don't know how to let go of that part of my identity along with so many other things I had to give up to keep going. 

And it's this last loss, after having lost so many versions of "home," that has shredded my heart so completely after years of repair. It's as if that last little connection to the mountains, when ripped away, undid me completely all over again. 

Mountains aren't a euphemism for something that makes more sense to anyone else. They really do speak to me and soothe my soul. But yeah, there's a lot of mourning for a lot of things right now. Sometimes I wish I could have stayed in my lonely marriage. It would have saved me from so many versions of heartbreak., loss, and betrayal. But as much as I let slide for the greater good, the easier path, my children, the end was the end and nothing was going to stop that. 

As I watched the mountains shrink in my rearview mirror in the early morning of New Years Eve 2020, I looked forward to the future and embraced the hope that we would all be better in this next chapter (and we have been). I knew what I was giving up. I just didn't know how long losing all of those versions of home would hurt. And as tomorrow dawns without my little family packed in the car for our annual road trip, well find new ways to fill the spaces of our hearts that are left fractured and disappointed.