A chilly (feels good!) but beautiful night here in the Northeast and it feels good to be home. Last week while blogging from New Orleans, I mentioned just how much at home I felt every time I returned to that area. Tonight, as I write this, there’s also a sense of being home, but this kind of home feels different from the southern Louisiana kind of home.

Perhaps it all comes down to where your bones feel most ‘at home’.

Perhaps it’s simply familiarity with the surroundings, people and culture you grow up with.

I do know this, when I’m home in New England, it becomes a yardstick for measuring change, for here I sense the years that have passed in the places and people that have changed since my youth, and it makes you think of all the choices – good and bad – I’ve made in my life. In New Orleans, the people who have always called it their home undoubtedly sense the same passages of time I do here, but while I feel ‘at home’ there, as someone who didn’t grow up there, I don’t.

So I guess the question becomes: what does the sense of feeling ‘at home’ actually mean? I’m not sure of that, but I have a sense that I am incredibly fortunate to be able to feel ‘at home’ in more than one place.

I have no doubt there are restless souls out there who have never felt ‘at home’ anywhere – perhaps not even in their own skin.

And it is for them I offer up a silent prayer tonight.