Born in Wisconsin, for decades my home was in Minnesota and traveling back now is about things both at once familiar and dislocated, sights and thoughts and places and people covered with the patina of memory.

Everything seems familiar and I navigate with ease yet the houses I lived in are lost to someone else, the locations I frequented are both known and distant, the jobs no longer exist and the friends have moved on with their lives largely unaware that we walked a ways together just a few years ago.

That’s how it’s supposed to be, really. Life is always moving, too quickly now it seems in my sixties, and nothing ever really stays the same even if I had never moved on myself. Yet there is, sometimes, a kind of melancholic longing that comes when old places are visited and those who walked with me for a while come back to mind.

Looking back, as the miles passed beneath my wheels, I regret only the hard years, the time between 17 and 20 when everything was in disarray. I regret the hurt I caused people when, like a wounded animal, I often bit the hand not just of the deserving but those who were trying to come to my rescue. That’s the only “do over” I would want and the thoughts of those days remain painful to me even as grace has found its way through cracks in the darkness. There are people I cannot say “sorry” to not from lack of desire but rather because it would just hurt them more to be reminded of me. All I have is a prayer that God would somehow bless them in a way greater than I infringed. Those days are why I rarely ever go by my old high school and yet they’ve given me the gift of humility even as they also helped make me a Priest out of gratitude for surviving them and a desire to do and be better in recompense.

Yet, driving back home through the western Wisconsin Driftless there’s also gratitude. Music was played. Good people traveled with me and shared my Minnesota days. I regret nothing of the work I did trying to make the lives of nursing home residents somewhat better for my service to them. There were good times and good people and moments I wish I could live over and over again. I made it to Africa four times and found the love of my life in that state’s far north. Even as it was time to go a part of my heart never completely left and probably never will. When my days are done I’ll go back there and await the resurrection in a country cemetery an hour or so from North Dakota.

Still, these “turn and burn” trips to where my family still reside are always a mixture and I guess they always will. Grateful for where I am I still mystically see the faces of those I left behind and feel that strange mixture of sadness and joy and regret and gratitude that seems to come from revisiting the places that once anchored my body and heart in the storms of time. As important as it is for me to be where I am it was also valuable for me to have been where I was, good, bad, ugly, and blessed. And as long as my folks are there I will also return. That is the way of things.

And it’s good, in all my travels, to remember that my true Home, by grace, still waits without melancholy and without the patina of memory or good or bad but only grace.