Homesick for Not My Home…Yet

North Country Federal Credit Union. Morristown VT. I want to do my banking there. Why?

I currently do my banking at a local credit union here in Idaho. My married life has been here for ten years. My whole life, I’ve practically been here for 29 years. I have made “roots,” here. But I want to make roots somewhere else. But just how middle-aged tree hardly survives and uprooting, and planting elsewhere, I already know that trying to put roots down somewhere else will cause tension. Can I take my aging boys from their grandparents, aunts, uncles, everyone they’ve ever known? And while she had the most civil talk about the possibility as long as I’ve ever brought the subject up only a few weeks ago, her pensive melancholy lets me know the idea is not flattering.

My heart wants to console. And the only way I know how to console is to sacrifice, put to death, forget ever hoping. But can a man live without dreams? And for so long, I’ve felt the answer given to my homesickness for a place not my home, was “Find a new dream.” That’s like being asked to love a kid not your own at the expense of your own.

My Dad was in the Air Force, and for my parents’ married life, even up through 3 kids before me, they lived in many places. Georgia. South Dakota. Germany. New York. And then ended up in my mom’s hometown in Idaho. So perhaps the moving bug is built into me. Perhaps it’s because unlike most pastors, I’m the one who ended up not too far from where I’m from, while my siblings spread out across the States. Maybe I want “my state,” now.

There have been a few times in life when friends I know, and two brothers, who have ventured up to New England, and I was jealous. I have not enough money to even visit. Yet one brother, a pilot, now has a home base in New Hampshire. Another brother who works for a big telephone company, sometimes has made it to Boston for business visits.

Meanwhile for work related reasons, every mid-July I feel I’m going the wrong direction – I’m due on the other side of Portland, OR. Even if I got to go to the other Portland, in ME, that would be closer to where I feel like, know that home should be.

What draws me to the east? Sure, I love fall, and foliage is nice. But just as it would’ve been shallow to see “She looks pretty,” when asked about dating my wife, and I could always come up with more… the bottom line about my wife, is becoming to be a bottom line about my draw to Vermont. There’s something wordless, deep inside, a certainty that pervades thinking and emotion. My wife just is right. And Vermont is becoming just… right. As in, “Why not?”

The sun rises in mornings, the moon hails the night, Mondays follow Sundays, autumn follows summer, and my wife is joyously, pleasantly, certainly my wife, and… well… Vermont. A place I’ve never been to, never lived at, is just, well it makes a sort of innate, inborne, natural sense.

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And so, on Google Maps again. On the VT-15 hwy, in Morristown, VT, there’s a sign for Morrisville at the next left, 1 mile to Johnson, and 16 miles to Jeffersonville… and it’s in front of a bank. The North Country Federal Credit Union, that I’m sure, one day, it’ll be as familiar as my local bank. I’m going to bank there.