There are so many different ways to be homesick, she’s discovering. There’s the obvious kind: the textbook definition where you miss your parents and your home This is the kind she felt when she was 12 and spent three weeks at Camp Watama on Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire. Her tentmate was a girl named Cammy Mason from Short Hills who wore sparkly eyeshadow and liked to brag about how she had already watched Dirty Dancing with her older sister’s friends. Cammy’s brash confidence made her feel small and inexperienced and homesick for her two best friends still preferred to play board games and watch old episodes of I Dream of Jeannie when they had sleepovers.
Classic homesickness persisted over the years. She missed her parents when she was struggling, or sad, or sick. Once, during a work trip to Colorado, she got a stomach bug and spent a night, queasy and disoriented, in the upstairs bedroom of a kind-looking couple’s tidy home just outside of Boulder.
(She had rented the room on AirBnb without realizing it had no privacy or separate entrance, and rather required her to walk into the couple’s kitchen and up the stairs to a small bedroom with no door. There was a narrow wrought iron twin bed covered in a patchwork quilt that had belonged to the couple’s now-grown daughter, and a low bookshelf that held Archie comics and vintage chapter books like The Boxcar Children.
After dropping her bag at the AirBnb and awkwardly enduring a cup of tea with the older couple, she had headed to a nearby restaurant (James Beard-nominated, which she had been looking forward to for weeks) for dinner with her colleagues. Just after ordering, she had started to feel uncomfortably hot. When the server brought over a basket of warm sourdough buns oozing with cheese, she almost threw up at the yeasty smell, and she knew something was wrong. She politely excused herself before dessert, citing travel exhaustion, and rushed back to the AirBnb and up the stairs to kneel beside the claw-footed bathtub, retching.
Afterwards, curled up in bed in between bouts of nausea, she listened to the sound of the couple eating dinner: the clinking of glasses and the scraping of chairs as they got up and sat down and the quiet, comforting cadence of their conversation, and she wished so fervently for her own family and her own mother that she started crying hot tears that soaked the front of her pajamas.
Upon moving to Manhattan for an internship just out of college, she discovered the strange homesickness of being lonely in a sea of people. This homesickness was odd and unfamiliar—the more people around her, the worse it got.
She’d stand in the checkout line at the Union Square Trader Joe’s, the queue snaking through the store past the cheese case, and feel almost sickeningly desperate for the small Santoni’s Market in her hometown where she knew the cashiers by name and routinely ran into her parent’s friends. (Santoni’s was the most reliable place to see anyone; last time she returned home for a visit she bumped into—literally—her high school boyfriend when they both reached for the same box of Crispix.)
The first time she traveled to England, she experienced homesickness for a place she’d never called home: a curious nostalgia for a parallel existence, as if in a past life she had lived on some cobblestoned street in a town called Twickenham or Blackheath and spent her days drinking strong tea and discussing proper British football and ordering fish and chips from her local. (One night in college, she drunkenly tries to explain this phenomenon to a few other freshmen at a party in their dorm, and a German exchange student named Stefan teaches her the term fernweh, which translates to a feeling of longing for a place you’ve never been, which sounds similar.)
She’s lived in so many places. She had always loved the adventure of the unknown — one summer, leading backpacking trips in Glacier National Park, the next, planting grape vines at a winery in southern Italy. She had gone (briefly) to boarding school, spent a month sailing the San Juan Islands, rented an apartment in Seattle. She moved to Manhattan, joined a Tuesday night soccer league. Traveled again and again so far from the place she was raised — far from her parents, far from the familiar rhythms of home.
But her wanderings coexist with a perpetual tug towards home — or perhaps, they even reinforce the tug, as if she’s moving about the world on a rubber band and the further she travels, the stronger the force pulling her back to her center.
(It was in high school that she first read Wallace Stegner’s writing, learning the phrase sense of place. Her English teacher had written the following quote on the board during class one day and she’d inked it onto the back of her chambray blue notebook, tearing it out later to pin on the wall of her room: “Complete independence, absolute freedom of movement, are exhilarating for a time but may not wear well.” It was meant to be a winking joke to her parents, a sort of loving roast of their protectiveness, but as the years pass she discovers that its literal meaning holds more and more true.)
Upon meeting him, she learns a new definition of homesick: when a person turns out to be so essential that they themselves become a kind of home. Their mere presence in your orbit fixes you in place, as if you’re a puzzle piece that was suddenly fitted into place, but you hadn’t even known the puzzle existed. It wasn’t that she was unmoored before, but now that she knows him, she is suddenly aware that she would be if he cut the lines and set her adrift.
On their fifth phone call, he tells her he misses her. She’s standing in front of Formaggio Kitchen, looking in the plate glass window and debating whether to spend the extra money on the fancy anise and orange zest biscotti, when he says it. She smiles so widely that a stout woman in a tweed dress and a sour expression steps back from her, as if she might be a bit off. She is a bit off—she’s levitating.
Of course, the terrifying thing about a single person righting your path is that possibility that it won’t last. No matter how sure, or how solid, the relationship, life serves up an unending source of plot twists. The world ahead is opaque and Sphinx-like: no guarantee of happiness exists. Naturally, she tells herself, your only choice is to stay in the present and allow yourself to remain open.
But she has started to appreciate why people are religious, understanding that faith — true faith — would be an incredible comfort. It would be soothing to believe that what comes next is preordained for us, she thinks.
Doing the emotional equivalent of a trust fall is the very opposite: handing your heart over to another person who might tuck it in the pocket of their jeans and run off to Oregon and fall in love with some apple-cheeked twenty-something named Violet is…again, terrifying.
Him missing her, her missing him: It begins to add up in her mind to…something. She’s been in love with other people before — or at least the only version of being in love that she knew: Henry, for one notable example.
But this is different: The first time he doesn’t call for three days in a row, she gets a familiar dull ache in her stomach. It’s homesickness, she realizes, just like summer camp. Just like the horrible, exhausting weekends she spent the year she was fifteen in nondescript hotels in nondescript upstate towns playing travel field hockey. Just like the two weeks in high school she spent on a houseboat with her best friend Caroline’s family: a rollicking, raucous crew of three boys and the baby, Caroline, with endless inside jokes and their own family vocabulary (they measured time by “lassies” instead of hours, because of the length of time of the film by the same name, called “bagsy” instead of “shotgun” to claim the front seat, and referred to gin and tonics as “withs”, as in gin with tonic). Their closeness made her ache for her own siblings.
So when the phone does finally ring, it isn’t just relief that floods through her. It’s a rootedness, a rightness, a joy. It’s how she’d feel in college when she’d find a bright orange package slip affixed to her mailbox, and she’d walk to the campus post office to exchange it for a brown paper-wrapped shoebox with her address on the front in her mom’s tidy handwriting.
Inside was always the same thing: A tupperware box of neat squares of dense chocolate brownies, which she’d stash in the common room freezer and eat slowly at night while studying, each frozen bite chewy and rich and perfect.
Home, that’s what it was when she saw the box. It was home when she licked the crumbs from her fingertips. Home when she pictured her mom stirring the batter in the chipped blue striped ceramic mixing bowl. Home when he calls her.
Mom’s Classic Brownies
113g (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
2 to 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
398g (2 cups) granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
113g (1 cup) sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 8” x 10” pan, or a 9” x 13” pan.
Melt the butter and chocolate in a medium saucepan over low heat, stirring until the chocolate is mostly melted. Remove from the heat and stir until smooth, then add the sugar and stir well.
Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until the batter is smooth and glossy (you can do this by hand but just use some muscle!).
Stir in the flour and salt and mix quickly and lightly.
Scoop the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
Bake for 35 minutes (for the smaller pan) or 30 minutes (for the larger pan).
Do not over-bake! A knife or tester inserted into the center should come out with a few moist crumbs but no big streaks of wet batter. It’s okay if they look slightly under-baked overall. That’s the secret to their chewiness.
Let cool fully on a rack, then cut into small squares. Ideally, freeze before eating.