Where is Home?

Right now, I'm back home for a weekend visit. I've been thinking a lot about this idea of coming home because, as I was driving back to Arlington yesterday, I realized that I have not one home, but several. And I am truly blessed by that.

For those of you who know me well, you know that strange things make me cry: windmills (yes, windmills), cheesy commercials, a really well painted bookshelf, seeing dads loving on their children. Well, we have a new thing to add to this ridiculous list: dust storms. Yesterday, I was about an hour away from Dallas, when I saw this tiny little dust tornado spring to life and return to the earth as quickly as it had begun. When my first thought was, "Wow, a little piece of home," I was shocked. And it brought tears to my eyes. Why the ridiculous emotions, you may ask? Because this dust storm didn't remind me of my Dallas/Fort Worth home, but my Lubbock home in the West Texas desert. Despite the fact that I have been there a year, it has not truly felt like home to me until the moment I saw this dust storm, so much a part of daily life in West Texas, in an unexpected place.

I spent the next part of my drive reflecting on what it means to have a home. It's not simply a place to live, work, or study, but a place where you find community and connection, setting down roots and growing beyond fences. While Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington will always be my home with the deepest roots, I also consider Waco a second home, and now I can add Lubbock to this list. All these places have been a part of shaping who I am and what I do and who I love.

My DFW home means listening to NPR on long commutes, spilling coffee on my pants in sudden stand-still traffic, soaking up humidity and celebrating unexpected thunderstorms, finding art museums and coffee shops and taco shops on every corner, hiking around lakes, and visiting my grandparents. It is the place where I have countless friends and teachers who remind me of how loved I am and have seen me through years of struggles and heartache and insurmountable joy. This is the place where I remember running on playgrounds and seeing giant hawks on my way to school and standing in long lines at Six Flags and learning how to drive and scaring my mom half to death. It will always be my first and truest home.

I would have denied the possibility of this ever being true if you had told me this when I first got to Baylor 7 years ago, but I deeply miss the Waco home I left 4 years ago. It will forever be the place where I remember late night coffee dates at Common Grounds, imagining what it would be like to dive off the cliffs at Cameron Park into the Brazos River, endless Sic 'Ems, thinking that the halls of Brooks College are really the hallowed halls of Hogwarts, admiring the golden roof of the Chamber of Commerce, driving through rolling hills, and dancing it out with my roommates.

My new Lubbock home reminds me of friendly smiles at the grocery store, a big open sky, stretches of cotton fields as far as the eye can see, and considering it "traffic" if you have to slow down to 55 on the highway for a few minutes. It means falling into deep, spontaneous friendships with people that bring me so much joy and happiness and aren't afraid to call me out of my BS every once in a while. While I love all the cacti and dust storms and jackrabbits in Lubbock, it really is my incredible friends that make this place home.

So while I am a bit surprised that Lubbock has now made it onto the very exclusive list of my homes, I think I've decided to let it stay there. I will continue to let this big town-small city shape me and guide me into the person I am becoming, and I'm excited to see where else in the future I will be able to add to my places I find comfort in as home.