Coming Home – Angela’s Family
I was standing on the musty, shadowed wraparound porch of an old farmhouse, looking for the first time at a view that would soon become familiar. Mark and I were on a late-December house-hunting trip to Colorado while the boys were with family in Ohio.
A week before, we’d taken our final safari drive in the lush rains of Botswana, parked the jeep at an airstrip, then flight-hopped across thirty-seven hours and nearly ten thousand miles to land in the frigid, leafless suburbs of Cincinnati. Jarring, but worth it to reach my parents’ welcoming home and spend the holidays together. Especially since we had no home to go to—not even a hometown. That also meant there was no pressure to return to a house and unpack, or to be anywhere else. No one knew we were back, so we could fly under the radar and get our bearings.
We’d been watching this house as we trekked across two continents. It needed loads of work, but there were job opportunities nearby, and it was on a sweet bit of land at the intersection of mountains and prairie. Having spent so much time in nature while on the road, we needed space to breathe as we put down new roots. We negotiated the purchase, but the house wouldn’t be ready for a while, so first we settled into a bland corporate apartment furnished with hard mattresses and hotel soap. It was bigger than most of the places we’d stayed during the past two years; I preferred the coziness of our RV and single-room rentals. We sold the RV, and I was sadder to see it go than anything we’d ever owned.
We tried to calibrate into a semblance of “normal,” although I wasn’t quite sure what that meant anymore. Ronan, fourteen, enrolled in an entrepreneurship program so he could meet some kids his age. He wouldn’t start school for many months and was navigating a rocky social road in the meantime. We visited California so he could spend some time with his old crew. For Asher, now eleven, we found a temporary spot in a quirky experiential school with self-paced learning, a chicken coop, and daily chores. He was psyched to be with peers again, but missed unstructured days and the ocean.
Setting up shop in a new place was like a tailwind of our Wonder Year, and we threw ourselves into becoming Coloradans. The boys learned to ski, and Mark and Ronan ran the BOLDERBoulder 10K with fifty thousand new friends. We went to concerts at Red Rocks. I worked for a state ballot campaign and joined a hiking group to stay connected to my boots and the earth. Our home served as a rest stop for friends and family heading into the Rockies, giving us a chance to be the hosts rather than the hosted.
That fall Ronan and Asher both started at new public schools. District administrators didn’t blink an eye at their unusual academic histories, slotting them into grade years based on their birthdays with no questions asked. Asher was elected to student council, and Ronan attended his first homecoming. Mark found a good job, the two-year gap on his résumé inconsequential. He was away a lot, and I missed him.
Months in, I couldn’t shake my attachment to the old crossbody purse that held my essentials while traveling. Remnants of both jungle and desert were ground into its worn surface. I missed the weight of the camera pack that was usually slung over my shoulder with it. Mostly, I missed being outside a ten-mile radius and spending time together as an unhurried, unscheduled family.
It became a running joke that we kept finding ourselves together in the same room of the house—four humans and a canine. Timber, our dog, was enthralled by the elk that passed through our woods but terrified of Colorado thunderstorms. One evening, we returned home to an enormous black bear in our front yard. For a fleeting moment, life felt wild again.
But: a creeping realization set in. The structure of our lives was looking a lot like before. Unconsciously, we had recreated the way things were prior to our worldschooling journey—and what a folly that was, since we had intentionally stepped away from the before to find ourselves. There was no shedding the impact of a Wonder Year; we were fundamentally changed, and things couldn’t just go back to the way they were. So why had we rebuilt our lives to look almost the same, just in a new place?
With that awareness, we spent the next several years undoing it all again. Finally untethered once more, we took a Wonder Summer, and some Wonder Weeks and Wonder Weekends, to recover the real us. We had a better sense of what us looked like now. We recognized those people when we saw them, and we liked inhabiting their skin.
