Can You Go Home Again?

Was Thomas Wolfe Right?

The Mississippi River from Mississippi River Blvd, St. Paul

I have always been a bit haunted by the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.

As someone who has lived away from the place where I grew up for far longer than I ever lived there—but who still holds it dear to my heart, and essential for holding onto my sense of who I am, and what “home” really means—reflecting on those words has always made me a little bit uncomfortable.

So uncomfortable that I mostly just don’t do it.

(“Can’t you go home again? And why can’t you?” my rebellious self wants to say.)

And yet I know that surely it must be true. Things don’t stay the same when you’re gone; they can’t. People don’t stay the same. You don’t stay the same. Some of the people you hold most dear move away, or die.

Some of the places change too. Buildings go up where they didn’t used to be. Other buildings come down. It’s not the same place it was when you left it.

So how can you go expect to find the same thing there that you found way back when?

Nonetheless, I decided this summer that I was going to try. It wasn’t so much a plan as a stubborn compulsion that drew me to Minnesota for the past six weeks, despite several obstacles that a more reasonable person might have taken as a sign that it wasn’t a good time to go.

The main obstacle was the fact that a few weeks short of the time I was planning to take a 12-hour international plane trip to get there, I tore a hamstring. (Which is a more serious injury than it might sound like, especially for a 71-year-old woman.)

So when I probably should have been starting a course of physical therapy to begin to get my movement and flexibility back (in other words to be able to walk more than fifty yards in a row with any ease), I instead got myself onto a train to Paris; then on a plane in Paris; changed to another plane in Reykjavik, and twelve hours (or so) later was being picked up at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport by my sister.

I wasn’t able to do all of what I had planned to do in the time I was there due to that injury. I had planned to visit friends in various parts of the state, but some of that was not possible. I couldn’t drive at all, and I couldn’t walk very well either. For the first couple of weeks all I was able to do was hobble—cautiously, carefully, hesitantly—around the block (a very flat, easy-to-walk-around block) at my sister’s house in St. Paul. I wasn’t able to do physical therapy since a) my health care practitioners (and coverage) are in France now, not in the US, and b) unlike in France, health care in the US is prohibitively expensive. So the PT was going to have to wait until I was back in France.

But it felt very important to me to make this trip for reasons I couldn’t fully fathom myself, and would not have been able to justify had anyone asked me to do so.

Now, as I prepare to return to France, I am pleased that, in addition to having had some good, relaxed time to be with friends and family, and spend some leisurely time in my hometown, which was a big part of what I wanted to do, I also achieved the goal of depositing artifacts at three different historical societies—one in Minnesota, one in Wisconsin, and one in Iowa. And with the Archives Committee at the rural church where my dad was raised.

More on that later (maybe). For now suffice it to say that both of my parents (and their parents, and grandparents) were “keepers.” Which means that there were a lot of very old and rather interesting pieces of social/cultural history in the trunks I have been opening and trying to empty in my home in France since they arrived there last November.

This was a clear-cut goal I had when I left France, with an entire carry-on suitcase (plus) of these materials. I was determined to get as many of the items in that suitcase into the hands of people who would (hopefully) find them interesting and be able and willing to preserve them. And return to France with a much lighter load (in several ways). And I achieved that goal, with some key assistance from my sister and one of my cousins.

But as it turns out, perhaps the most important thing I achieved on this trip was something I did not really have in mind when I set out on it.

I have been circling around the question of searching for home as I work my way toward writing my next memoir.

I haven’t done any writing at all while I was here—which is highly unusual for me—but every time I thought that maybe I should be writing, at least jotting down some notes, something has stopped me.

As I prepared to go to the airport today, I began to suspect that this trip may have been an important first step in that next memoir. Somehow. (I don’t know how yet.)

My time in Minnesota this year hasn’t been a time for writing. It has been a time for reconnecting in a very important way with my past. For spending important time with family, for seeing some friends I hadn’t seen for more than 50 years, and getting to know them again. For soaking in a myriad of sights, sounds, and experiences, and letting them marinate for a while.

For grappling with this tricky, and very soulful, question of what being “home” really means.

I am quite interested to see what comes out of it. Stay tuned…

Janet Hulstrand is an American writer, editor, writing coach, and teacher of writing and of literature who lives in France. She is the author of Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France; and coauthor of Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home.