On course

Golf is on.

I don't like golf, but it's keeping me company this evening now that football is over. They just showed a man filling a hole, plugging a hole with a sphere of sod and tapping it in so it disappears. Golf courses change? Holes aren't in permanent locations? You can't memorize the trajectory and pattern of pars?

It's a relief to know, actually. That a course is always changing, the end is unexpected each time, your angle of life adjusts to your new goal.

But I bet the holes are set, like cities on a map, and the man who opens and closes the holes knows the precise location of each one. That when a golfer recognizes the placement of a hole he's played before, he feels a twinge of home. A sigh. A wink at familiarity.

I've been in the process of reconsidering the placement of home for the last eight months, something I hadn't anticipated. You make a hole here, you make a hole there, and you keep moving forward through the course, and you don't think you'll ever get back to that original hole. That place where you first learned you could succeed, where the people live who have loved you the longest, where the trees keep close to the ground and expose the wide, full sky.

But, you realize, the place calls you back. The place asks you to come back. The place provides you a new goal, building off all you've learned from the other paths, and challenges you to come back and meet it. You think it's crazy at first, then less crazy, then totally crazy but the only thing to do. Because there's a person you're crazy about, and he's crazy about you, and he's got this house and this smile and these arms that hold you around the small of your back and these eyes that sing "home." And you've known it for a long time, that he would be the only one to bring you back. But that, because of him, you know you have the strength to return, that you're brave enough to go home and make a life and reach for that goal to make an impact on that town that first formed you.

You're standing at the start of something new, in a setting you thought you knew too well to return to. And it's more exciting than you ever thought it could be to say: I'm moving back to Hutchinson, Kansas, in May.