Planning on making a trip back to Iowa becomes daunting as I get older and un-wiser. But I have to go home nonetheless. My octogenarian parents are both now gone. They rest next to each other in the Rowan Cemetery. I am now a third owner of the farmhouse and forty acres. My two sisters and I inherited it to be the fourth generation living on the farm. I am basically planning to go back there to die there. I have six incurable diseases (diabetes, osteoarthritis, COPD, psoriasis, hypertension, and chronic allergies… geez, it is hard to remember them all). And I am a cancer survivor. Whichever way the wind is blowing at any moment may completely alter my future.
The saying from the author Thomas Wolfe, the author I alluded to in the title, is, “You can’t go home again.”
In many ways that is an inescapable wisdom. I will go back to my boyhood home of Rowan, Iowa. And it will not be the home I knew. Most of the people I knew there as a boy are long gone… to the graveyard west of town, or to Minnesota, or California, or places distant and unknown to me.
And it is not just the people. The buildings have changed. None of the businesses are the same except for the Post Office and the Library. And the Library is in a different building than it was.
But the memories persist. I know where I am when I am there. It is the center of the universe as I once knew it. And the only reason I can’t go home again is because I carry my home with me wherever I go. And, as fallen angels go, sometimes they simply pick themselves up and fly towards home.
Catch a Falling Star 