Maps Home

"You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose."
-Dr. Suess Oh, the Places You'll Go

So my friend Claire is an interesting mixture of sweet and insane. On the night of my birthday party she pulled out Suess's Oh, the places You'll Go and started reading. Little did she know that my dad offered that book--complete with a lovely dedication ("...you need fear not as you have already shown that you can push on through darkness and light...")--as sagely advice way back in 2004. I still pull it out periodically to remind myself that life is okay (and that Suess was a technicolor genius).

I was thinking about places today as I sat in the large, nearly empty adjunct office at Harper College waiting for class to start. I'm going home this Thursday for my sister's birthday weekend and some refresh and recharge time with our family dogs. As I will be heading home through the suburbs--those tricky places--I decided to do a quick directions search and I stumbled on a little revelation.

The way the purple path sweeps down from the city to the "country" of central Illinois took me a minute to grasp. It isn't a route I've traveled before, at least in that particular direction as a functioning adult driving from my job to my childhood home.

Then I started thinking of all the other places I've lived.

I did a brief stint at the University of Illinois in Champaign.

That was followed by a much longer stint at Illinois College in Jacksonville which is just minutes from my childhood home.

While I was studying at IC, I lived briefly in Paris.

Then I ended up at Iowa State University in Ames.

And now I'm in Rockford (which quickly followed a barely-there blip in Woodstock).

It became clear to me that I've been to many places but I've always been grateful for the map (and the subsequent trip) home.