You know the trope-y-feeling plotline with the ex from your hometown? Who you never call and hardly ever think about yet you end up together every time you’re both back in town? And then you wonder about alternate timelines and what if you two were actually meant to be together and what does it mean that this person feels like home every time?
That’s me, except in my story the ex is my hometown in the fall.
Everyone’s hometown has the usual stuff: the elementary school playground where you got tossed onto your back by a bully for the first time. The parking lot where you learned to drive a stick shift despite your mother’s certainty you would destroy her clutch before reaching anything resembling proficiency. The high school where you held hands with your ninth-grade boyfriend for the first time, walking to the stadium for the Homecoming game.
My hometown is a beauty. Rolling hills, brilliant fall colors, quaint little river towns out of a storybook. Covered bridges, a splash of frost across the tips of meadow grasses, the Delaware River flowing strong and steady toward Philadelphia.
It’s a magical place.
It’s also a complicated place. I explore some of that in She’s Not Home, which is set in a fictionalized version of my hometown. But none of that exists in back-in-town mode. That suspension of everything outside the bubble is what enables us to reunite for twenty-four hours and think, why did we ever break up?
Also, being back in town for a friend’s memorial likely put me in my feelings a little extra. Our graduating class literally voted Ben “best personality” in our senior yearbook. Packing into a firehouse to celebrate the life of one of the best people any of us have met—a firehouse in one of those picturesque villages along the river, at the most beautiful time of year—left my heart feeling extra tender.
I was grateful to be there, to have been able to be there. To have strayed, but never too far away to come back when I’m called.
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