I realize that wisdom must be waited for. Time needs to season events into lessons worth learning and a brain needs to be mature enough to receive the lessons.

I have always spent an inordinate amount of my time in watchful, thoughtful silence. I like to think of myself as invisible. I did this in a crowded room just this morning.

I have filed away mysteries and hoped that some day the missing pieces would show up. I did not expect eureka moments to dramatically present themselves at the proper time. I was just hoping to eventually have enough epiphanies so that some of those lingering questions could be laid to rest.

My job, as I have seen it, was just to pay attention. Most times I did not even bother to ask questions for clarification. I was too busy and confused. I also did not want to interrupt my observations. I figured the missing pieces would show up later.

This silence and lack of participation has come back around lately. I guess you could say now IS later, and I still feel almost as dumb and numb as the days of the confusing events.

When a new clue shows up decades later and causes neither a eureka nor an epiphany I feel a bit befuddled. Maybe the clue needs to sit a while to smolder?  OR Maybe my brain is not quite ready to fully grasp the lesson?

Now that I have circled the subject several times I am just going to come out with what I think about a saying that I keep coming across in my reading.

“You can’t go home again.”

(Book title. Thomas Wolfe sort of. I know. If I die and leave piles of notes, I hope someone will trash my ramblings instead of posthumously assuming I would want them released.)

This whole time I have thought of this title/saying as a sad way of saying your home changes and you go back and things are different and some things you really miss are not there anymore. Yes, this is true and a bit sad.

I spent eight months in 2023 and 2024 living in my childhood home and going through every itty bitty item to save or sell to pay my mama’s bills. I spent many hours sitting at our kitchen table in silence wondering what the fuck Thomas Wolfe (or his editor, or They) was/were talking about. Every damn thing was still here. I was sixty-three and hauling my Mama’s wedding dress down from the attic. Nothing ever left BUT me and my sister!

(If you scholars want to wander off with the fascism hypothesis here…go on without me. That’s NOT where I am going.)

That house was emptied and sold.  More losses … more deaths and more time. I am now spending time in another place I spent parts of my childhood in.  It’s been like haunting myself. So you could say I have gone home again and again. Same furniture, same photos, same piano.

BUT (it’s a big one)

I am not the same. I am the one who changed. I am in the same places, but no longer that person anymore.

YOU Can’t Go Home Again!

I must say, I am NOT sad about that at all. That makes so much sense. I guess I had to be sixty to season that enough to get it. So it really isn’t about HOME at all.

It’s about YOU.

This is an example of what I mean about wisdom. I was looking for one answer and something completely different showed up.

Eureka!

FLOW