Home is Where We are.

I’ve left Wyoming,  my birth place and where I grew up, “permanently”three times in my life.  The first – at 18 years old when I joined the Navy. The second when Karl and I moved to California.  The third time just seven months ago when we moved to the Virgin Islands. Based on the previous sentence, you can know that I have also returned to my birthplace as well.  When I returned after my Navy adventure, I brought with me two beautiful little munchkins.  I came ‘home’ for safety and the circle of security and support that Cheyenne offered in the faces of my parents and a life I understood. As a newly divorced single mom, I needed all the help and encouragement I could find. The second time we returned we were seeking fewer people and a less harried life than the one we’d made for ourselves in the 15 years we were in California.  It was just Karl and me that came back that time… our kids were off on their own life journeys by then. Both times I came back willingly and eagerly but the reality is that I have always had a love-hate relationship with Cheyenne.

So now, we’re back again, but just for a little while. We are living in our ‘gypsy wagon’ parked a little out of town at the home of Karl’s cousin and best friend.  Being a visitor in a place that has been home is an interesting endeavor. We belong here, yet we don’t. Our  friends welcome us and are happy to see us, but sometimes there’s a tiny hesitation, an oddness that comes with absence.

There are lots of things I hate about Cheyenne and Wyoming, but then again there are lots of things I love.   We’d been here not even four days last week when a mean little storm blew in bringing with it hail (only pea sized for us – no damage thank God, but for others in town the hail was soft-ball sized.  Lots of broken windshields and dented cars in town now!).  I was in the trailer before the hail started when Karl called me outside to watch a tornado north of us. Its long, thin white funnel dipped and danced across the sky underneath a dark cloud.   I really love tornadoes, and since this one was far enough away from us that it wasn’t a threat and out on the prairie so that no one else was probably in peril I could just enjoy its power and oddity. Just like all storms in Wyoming, whether summer storms with green clouds, hail and small tornadoes or blizzards that blind and freeze, this one passed quickly enough so that by evening the sun came out in time for a terrific sunset.

That’s another thing I love about Wyoming.  The sky here is beyond imagination.  In a 360 degree panorama, you can look straight ahead and see the sky. (Unlike in big cities where it is only overhead, or back east where trees obscure the view.) Daytime skies are a deeper blue than anywhere else I have ever been. Night lets you see stars and the Milky Way so clearly it seems you could reach out and pluck one of the cold-silver twinkles from the darkness without even stretching to your tip-toes.  We love sitting on the gallery of our island home to watch the sun set into the Caribbean, but sunsets are different here.  Colors here are not the same, the clouds themselves have more dramatic, showy shapes.

Right now, I am writing and watching out the window while the wind makes the knee-high grass wobble and bend. I can count at least three hues of green in the field beside me, plus yellow, deep blue, white, and pink flowers thrown in.  A meadowlark is sitting on the fence, singing my most favorite Wyoming song (second even to the howl of coyotes, which I also love).   A bit ago, I watched a large hawk playing in the wind currents, too high to be hunting, just flying for the sheer joy of it. I know that by the end of the summer I will be more than happy to get on an airplane and go back home to my island.  I miss my friends and my church and my house there.  But.  This morning, I am also home, and I am thankful.