Right now I am between homes. I am. Not in the literal homeless way, but in the more a figurative way. I went back to Sonora this past week and it was just not the same.

People have changed. Good friends have grown and matured. Couples have grown closer together and marriages strengthened. People cute together are no longer together.

Places have changed. Familiar hangout spots are now old and there are new ones to take their place. People have moved rooms, moved houses. Houses are owned and places are being rented.

There are individual trees that are missing. The roads are changing. The path to the swimming hole is no longer second nature and requires me to consciously think about each step.

But the mountains are the same. The forests still have the same smells and same sounds. My friends are still my friends, and my family is still my family.

It was all familiar, it was all correct. But something didn’t fit right.

I think it could have been me.

The feeling kind of makes me think of a jacket that you’ve let someone else wear for eight months. It still fits you, just they’ve worn it. Their shoulders fit in different places. There are new holes along with all the old ones. Maybe there are even some patches now.

It’s home but it isn’t. Same, but different.

So where is my home now? I could say something like “home is where the heart is, so your real home is in your chest” and try to be funny, but I won’t.

While I was there I felt happy, but something was missing. I didn’t belong. I had a bed to sleep in, but it wasn’t my bed. I was sleeping in someone else’s room, eating some else’s food, and driving someone else’s car.

Is it that my things are that much a part of my identity? I did pick them out. I did let them into my life. I do spend a lot of time using them and spend money keeping them up and running.

It wasn’t just that. Life moved on without me and I recognized that. My roots felt the soil of my nursery and they knew I was supposed to be somewhere else.

So I’m here. “Home” for now. Why this is home, I’m not sure. This is where I can pull nutrients out of the dirt, drink the sunshine, and receive the water given to me. It doesn’t taste the same, it might not even taste as good, but it’s what I need, where I’m planted.

Sonora was home. Sonora will always be home. But I am not there now.

What will I say about this time in my life? What will I tell my kids about how I met their mother and of the relationships before? How this foreign land carved the flesh off of my bones and laid my innards bare? How I fought and how I lost and how I loved? What will I say?

What will the stories say about how I came to this land? How I thought I really knew who I was and how life proved me wrong and I was humbled and laid low. How a man so confident in many ways was discovered to be timid when it mattered. How a fighter lost so many times that he grew pessimistic, bitter, and untrusting.

Will they tell how, carved to the bones and innards laid bare, I was resurrected? How the muscle and sinew we carefully handled. Stroked and smoothed. How with loving hands each tendon was placed right where it should be – not where it was before, but where it should be, where it was designed to be.

And how the fighter found someone to believe in him and he managed to land a punch and win the fight.

And how the timidness was revealed to be fear and that the fear was driven out?

How a bent, beat, broken man became whole and well?

Will the history tell that here, in this place, I was redeemed?