Moving the heart from place to place
By Lisa Leone
When people ask me where my home is I usually say that I don't have one. But in reality, I mean to say, I have many. There are pieces of my heart strewn up and down the East Coast, from New York to Virginia to Florida. Florida is my destination for spring break so I can visit my family, but I can't really say I am going home.
It's strange to think that home is a place in which I have not spent more than three weeks of my life. It is strange to think that my family has a new life in a new place and suddenly it's supposed to be my home. Try calling a place home where you don't know the roads or the people, where you don't have a favorite hangout or a friend who lives down the street.
I am still a tourist. I love the tourist shops and the busy beaches. I love to visit the orange groves and art museums. I love the fact that my parents live next to a man-made lake where an alligator lives (my little brothers named it Allie). This place bears no resemblance to the wooded yard where I grew up in northern New York or the house in the suburbs in northern Virginia. It is my new home, but only because home is where the heart is.
I guess I can't complain. What better place to be forced to call home than the palm trees, white-sand beaches and clear blue water of the Gulf? It is a true spring break and I don't have to pay for a hotel! Instead of returning to a boring town and an old job for the week, I will be getting a tan and meeting new people. I will eat lots of ice cream and go to the movies and pretend I am a kid again. I'm going to wave "hi" to Mickey Mouse and take late-night trips to the ocean. The best part of the whole trip will be to play the "cool" older sister, to watch my brothers play baseball and take my sister to concerts.
Even if Florida is not exactly home, it will be an awesome spring break. I can just feel the excitement and hear it in the voice of my brother when he eagerly asks, "So, when are you going to be home?"
Home and change in the mist and rain
By Jen Turner
Portland, Oregon. It's not exactly the most enticing Spring Break 2004 destination. Yet it is where I will spend that glorious week off in the middle of March. After glancing at my bank statement, I have two options: I can stay at school and basically not eat or leave my room for a week, or I can go home. A basic pro/con analysis revealed that I have a lot of reasons to venture home this break. Hence, I will return to the rain-mist that I grew up in, to sit in the same places I did as a weary high school freshman on break, only this time we're fast-forwarded four years, and I'm wondering if anything has changed.
Seeing as how I am some 3,000 miles away, I don't get to go home too often. Fall break found me in Providence, R.I., visiting friends, and Thanksgiving in Philadelphia with my grandfather. So spring break, just long enough to make the 8-hour flight time seem worth it, finds me back in Oregon, a place where park benches, items intended to be sat upon, are too wet to ever serve their purpose justly. This is a place known for its coffee shops, bookstores and somewhat utopian outlook on life.
This is where I will saunter up Hawthorne Boulevard, slump into a booth in Cup & Saucer Caf, nestled quaintly along a row of places boasting the finest records or vintage clothes in town, and spend hours tracing the lines on the olive-green Formica. Just like any one of us away from home, I will track down the transient teenage ruffians I call my friends, to see who has a new haircut, new job, new girlfriend or new life.
The word "hometown" eludes me. Each one of us has one, and even if we're both from Kansas City, Houston or Los Angeles, each idea of home is different. To me, Portland is attacking the big blue "I" that sits in Pioneer Square while waiting for a friend to arrive on the MAX train. It is the Guild Theater or Cinema 21, watching the random arty movies that no place, not even the Fox Tower, would play. It is driving over the Burnside Bridge on an overly bright Sunday morning and noticing the way the sun looks on the Willamette River.
Home is sitting on my mom's overstuffed sofa, where I watch "Noggin" while digging into a box of Cheez-Its. It is fighting with my sister over who gets to drive the car, and then winding up going to the same party in the end. It is sleeping in my own bed, eating food that I didn't pay for, avoiding the telephone and not thinking about the sociology mid-term I have to hand in on Monday. It is for all those reasons that I am returning to Portland, where everyone can do a double-take on this Washingtonian as she embraces her hometown.
Tropical paradise has nothing on dairy farm utopia
By Grant Ritter
As spring break quickly approaches, many students are eagerly packing their bags for warmer destinations. I laugh at them, as they foolishly head to their tropical, MTV-sponsored paradises. My plane is headed to the icy, slushy, cow-dominated Eden known as home.
A week of partying off half a semester's worth of academic stress? Please! Give me a family Scrabble game and a fragrant dairy farm any day of the week! Washington, D.C., is nothing compared to Hadley, Mass. D.C. may have many exotic neighborhoods, world class museums and government buildings, but they don't compare to Hadley's Farm Museum (it has a killer broom corn exhibit) and 4,000 residents who spread gossip faster than high school girls.
Despite its shortcomings, Hadley has the kind of small town charm, made famous by John Mellencamp and Kenny Chesney, which is seven generations embedded in me. Next week will provide a chance to escape D.C.'s resume-saturated, "anything-to-advance-my-career" lifestyle in favor of Hadley's laidback, nonpolitical and bureaucracy-free lifestyle. Cracking open a beer, throwing on the country music and dealing out a few poker hands with old friends is the only prescription for my stuck-in-the-Beltway blues.
Go ahead and enjoy your week of partying, I hope you make a new "friend" and "special memory" every night (hopefully not special, burning or itchy enough to need medication). To each his/her own, but I happily choose a week of small-town good times which give me a feeling that O.A.R's "I Feel Home" says best: "There are few things pure in this world anymore, and home is one of the few. We'd have a drink outside, maybe run and hide if we saw a couple men in blue. To me it's so damn easy to see that true people are the people at home. Well, I've been away but now I'm back today and there ain't a place I'd rather go"
