The framed photograph of our home taken from space was a wedding gift from a high school friend. I remember one night during our junior year my friend asked when I was going to stop acting like I was just visiting. He had lived on Cape Cod his entire life; I had moved there the summer before my ninth grade.

Every four or five years of my life I have experienced a significant relocation. New school. New neighborhood. New town. New state. Moving is my norm. I learned to carry my home with me, making me more turtle than bear.  

I cannot remember my response that night, but nearly four decades later I know what my answer should have been: never. Being a visitor keeps me awake.

That photograph from space of our home on Cape Cod shows the land stretching into the Atlantic, a single arm, elbow pushing East, fist curled inward – flexing. A defiant spit of land weathering winds, tides, and waves.

If I was an alien traveling through space (my own planet somehow destroyed) and I looked down from my ship to see Cape Cod framed in the window, I would stop searching.  I would pick the outermost stretch of beach as the place to land, settle, raise a family, and live deliberately.

Four decades later, I still feel like a visitor even though I live one street from the house I called home when I was fourteen. I did move away for nearly thirty years, but then found myself returning home one move at a time once I became a father. 

A place can seep into you. No matter where you travel or how long you stay away, there is a pull, a gravity you cannot escape. The land raises you. An ocean horizon calls for dreaming. Winter storms encourage restlessness. The rising and falling of the tides humbles. The slant of light reminds: simply being on this planet, spinning through space with our feet firmly on the ground is a miracle. 

There is an unfinished feel to everything here, a constant effort to rebuild as winds erode and waters rise, our arm of shifting sand and wind-bent scrub pines defying the demise of Atlantis. Barrier fences sink into sand they cannot hold back, bouldered jetties dissolve in winter waves, parking lots break away overnight, and buildings drown. One day there will only be water. 

* * *

Reinvention must be hard for those who live in places built to last. Cemented sidewalks, reflective glass buildings, manicured lawns, and the year round hum of progress. Places where consistency and efficiency outshine change and tinkering. Places where things look the same day, after day, after day. Places where arriving is the end and idling is a sin.

We do not need to move away to live as visitors. We can visit at home by choosing to explore, discover, and celebrate the everyday. The examining light of the visitor shines directly overhead – vanishing the shadow of projections cast by those who claim to know us – definitively. Visiting at home, we unmask until there is nothing left to hide behind.

The common becomes sacred: the glow of the new day breaking, the smell of the wind, the shadows of the trees, the reflections of the water, the sounds of the rain, the last rays of daylight, and the stillness of the night sky. 

To be a visitor at home means never having to leave in search of something more. It means seeing that everything you need is everywhere all the time. It means understanding: you have to make your own peace, be your true self, and see things for what they have to offer.