Experiencing Return While Visiting Home

Reflections on a long visit with family in the country landscape of my birth

This past weekend, I got back to Wisconsin after spending 11 days in Indiana with my family. The first few days passed in a whirlwind, driving from one town to the next and then the next, making three, four, five stops to catch up with loved ones, drink coffee, run errands, play with my nieces and nephews, and repeat. At night, I’d answer a few emails, catch up on a to-do or two, and read several chapters before collapsing into bed. Each day ended in exhaustion but also with a great deal of happiness.

On the first day home, while chatting around the kitchen island, my youngest brother exclaimed, “Stop speaking English!”

We stared at each other for a beat before laughing. I confided that I thought I was losing it—our native language—a little, and he said, “Well, you had better get to using it.”

Okay then!

So I did. We laughed again as I stumbled over several words, painfully aware of how much language dissipates when it isn’t given time on the tongue. My own tongue felt thick and sluggish, unsure of how to wrap around words I hadn’t used regularly in so long, but I kept at it. Each day more returned. The words became smoother and easier, and soon I felt at home once more in my first language.

Back in 2023, the word return arrived to me, and I regarded it with dread. Most of my life has been an effort in getting out and away from both places and ideas—sometimes even from people—so the thought of return to *anything* chafed. But return would not let me be. It haunted my poems and essays, my meditations and journal meanderings as I considered to what and where and who I might be called to return.

On my second-to-last full day in Indiana, while driving to and from another brother’s house in a meandering landscape of fields dotted with patches of woods and ribboned through with rivers, a sorrowful longing drew up in me. Prior to this one, my visits home consisted just of weekends, sometimes with an extra day or two thrown in. I hadn’t been home this long since before I moved to Nashville, Tenn., after graduating early from college over 10 years ago. Now, I had returned and stayed long enough for my first language to return to me, long enough for that language to replace English in my thoughts, for it to become the one I reached toward first. Oh. Return.

Gratitude for this and much more—moments of clarity, meaningful conversations, unexpected pockets of healing, treasured times with the littles—all flooded through me as I drove through that familiar landscape, the sun high in a blue, blue sky, the vultures forever circling overhead. Return settled in next to me, awakening me to the steps ahead.