Indira Ganesan, Sue’s Daffs, 2013

I have been wondering in the past thirty-eight hours how to begin to unpack my impressions of my first visit back after two years. Finally, I made some toast and jam, and a cup of rose tulsi tea, and now I’ll begin.

Home is one of those words that I use to return to “that which I know where I rest.” For a few days, home has been my friend’s home  where I retired and replenished during my travels in Colorado. I have often spoke of home being the yoga workshop where I once practiced with some diligence among my friends. Home is of course in, South Asian parlance,where my parents live. To say come home means come visit me at home: come [to my} home.

Boulder is home. It is where I am comfortable, and can breathe easy, where things look similar if not quite the same. It is where my friends have like me grown two years older. It is where I run into people I know but don’t quite know, who say, I haven’t seen you in a while, and I say, I’ve been away two years, and because it is Boulder, city of bicycles and slow-moving mountains, that is accepted.

To declare allegiance to one home over another is of course to betray another home, where you have friends, where you are supposed to be making a life. To choose, as Georgia O’Keeffe did in Santa Fe (when I saw it, I knew it was mine) is a form of colonization, for no place really belongs to anyone.

I tried to pay close attention to when I came home to Provincetown, where I live now, but I was caught up in a conversation about other cities, other lives with another traveler, an artist who travels for work. I wanted to know if I felt a stirring, if the sand and marsh were saying, this, too, is home.

I have no conclusions. There is in me a desire to have a home, a permanent city apartment, a place where I can do with less clutter. I know I went to Boulder to see friends and to read from my book, and re-discovered my community.