Sunday Morning Sidewalk: Home From the Hill

As I get ready to head home early this morning from one of the better vacations I have taken in a while, I find myself carrying two emotions that should probably conflict more than they do. I loved nearly every minute of this trip, yet I am also ready to go home.

The first three days were filled with baseball and fun, followed by three more with my granddaughter as we celebrated her first birthday. For those of you who followed her journey last year, you know this was never a milestone our family could simply assume would arrive. Seeing her smile, hearing her laugh and watching the absolute joy with which she seems to approach her little world felt like a blessing I cannot adequately describe.

There is something strange about moments like those. You understand, perhaps more clearly than you normally allow yourself to, that the moment is disappearing even while you are living inside it. A first birthday eventually becomes a second, the little girl laughing in front of you becomes someone older, and someday the pictures will become evidence of a time you would gladly step back into for just a few minutes.

And yet, even surrounded by all that joy, I missed home. I found myself thinking about long walks with Fiji, the familiar routines that sometimes become almost invisible because I see them every day, and the excitement that comes with football season finally arriving. There was no desire to leave the trip early or somehow exchange what I had experienced for something else. I was simply beginning to feel the pull of the place to which I belong.

Robert Louis Stevenson captured something of that feeling in Requiem:

“Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

I have always liked those lines because the idea of home becomes more meaningful after the sea and after the hill. The journey does not diminish the destination. In some ways, it teaches us what the destination means.

I found myself thinking about that this week because so much of what Oregon football has been telling us lately