Home

I had been going out with my boyfriend for some time when one day he informed me that the company would be sending him to the United States for an extended period of time. We talked it over and agreed that I would go with him as his girlfriend. We were too young to marry. This news was not met with glee by the family on any level but they accepted it.

One day, the General Manager at my place of work offered me a lift home and whilst he had me as a captive listener he told me that he did not approve. It was not at all right that a young girl accompany a man across the seas unless she were his bride. Far better, he said, that we should marry before we left.

Time has a way of twisting the truth in one's mind and I suppose other people commented on the situation as well, but it is that conversation that has always stayed in my mind. Perhaps my 'boyfriend' and I discussed it some more. I don't remember. However, some time after that, he proposed and we did marry before we left to start our lives together as newlyweds on the other side of the world.

It wasn't entirely blissful in that first year. He travelled a great deal around the United States with his job and I was commuting into New York City each work day with my job - a job that paid the bills rather than fulfilled me. The land was foreign to me. It took time for me to understand how that continent worked and I missed my homeland. I felt awkward asking for tomAto on my sandwich when I so wanted to say tomuto. I found the summer stifling hot and the humidity draining. I had no understanding why people lived on wretched looking and smelling coffee. And, why were so many advertisements about heartburn? Just how did this country work?

I no longer remember quite why I went home to Australia later that year but I remember that before my journey back to the United States, I suggested that my husband not bother to come to pick me up at the airport. It would be midnight and I could catch one of those limousine taxis back to our town. He agreed.

The plane got in and I still remember being very tired but grateful to have the long journey over. I remember feeling neither here or there. Australia was no longer my home and nor was the land where we had settled. I just remember feeling displaced and rather lonely. I began to think about finding my way to the limousine taxi area.

One thing you don't know about me is that I am rather useless in a crowd. It is often just one big blob of people to me and I have trouble seeing any one person in particular. Yet, when I looked into the crowd at this moment, I could see quite clearly that there was my husband, wearing the big brown sweater that I had knitted for him.

I think that even though the details of events get a bit hazy as we age, we do still tend to remember how we feel at any moment and at that moment I felt that I had come "home". Wherever he was, that was my home. And so it is to this day.