"You Can Never Go Home"

This was a saying that I heard throughout my 27 year Army career, but I never truly understood it until I tried to do exactly that when I retired. "Home" for me was New England as I was born and grew up in New Hampshire.  I was very excited about the prospect of finally taking off the uniform and returning to New England where I would pick up my life again and enjoy my twilight years basking in the company of friends and family.  Unfortunately that home I was returning to no longer exists.  I learned that home is not a place but a combination of people and your relationships with them.  People, over time, move on with their own lives and their own relationships, some even have the effrontery to die.  This changes forever what "home" is.  I was deluded in my all too brief visits home over the years when, during those visits, old friends and family members made extraordinary efforts to be there for me.  Now that I am here permanently, there is less urgency to the socializing and it's too easy for all of us to delay getting together in the face of other day to day priorities.  No one is to blame - life has a rhythm that is constantly in motion.  It was extremely naive of me to think I could just plug myself back into a context that had 27 years to evolve.   I often worried that I was robbing my children of this feeling of home by dragging them all over the world during their childhood.  They seem to be extremely well adjusted and mature - much more so than I was at their age.  I still feel they missed out by not having a place to really call home.  I now find that I will probably never consider where I live now as "home" and I'm going to have to find a place where friends and family can establish that long lost dream of "home".  The Army was right - you can never go home, but I'm going to build a new one.