Construction work aside, everything looks the same and oh, how I've missed it.

“So you’re home for the summer, then?”

“Yep,” I reply, “I guess.” But home has become a complicated thing. And I can’t help but answer that question a little uncertainly.

When I find myself speaking of my college dorm room and calling it home – while standing in the middle of my family’s house, toes tucked in the carpet of the very room that throughout high school was the only place I thought would ever deserve that name - it seems perhaps I ought to be more careful with my words.

I wonder how firm my grasp on the concept of home was in the first place, if two semesters away could shake it. I wonder too why this house doesn’t seem to feel betrayed at hearing another’s name uttered within its walls.

Maybe this house knows what a year at college has made me notice – as humans, we do a really good job of making ourselves at home.  Thrown into a campus of new people and unfamiliar surroundings, millions of college students every year find friends, stick posters on walls, and hear themselves talking about stopping by “home” between classes. Apartments and dorms become safe, normal, good home bases, even without our mothers and memories living there.

I expected college to get comfortable – what I didn’t expect was that living there would continue to feel real, that even after the dorm walls were stripped, wardrobe emptied, floor mopped and door locked, that empty room I used to share would still have some pull on my heart.     

People ask me about being home for the summer and don’t expect their words to trigger two different sets of thoughts and feelings. Bloomington is home; it always will be in the ways of roots and beginnings and returns. But it feels different now – not only because I’ve been to Ball State and seen how it is to live in the Muncie community, but because now I know it’s not the only place I can belong.

When people told me that Bloomington would be better when I came back, or at least that leaving it would make me better able to appreciate its nuances, they were right. What they didn’t make me realize when I set out to leave this town was that I’d be entering another one – and that I’d come to love its quirky downtown shops and one-way streets almost as much as these.

Growing up is about learning to understand how big the world is and - if you do it right - letting your heart and soul and mind grow to match its size.  

This summer I expect to smile and nod and think of my mother and the color my brother painted my bedroom when people making small talk ask me about being home for these months. Then in the fall I’ll go home to one room in a hallway of twenty identical ones and, until the friends and classes that make it seem real come round, wish I hadn’t had to leave this one so soon.