48 49 THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW moving, can almost touch the girl I used to be. But in Minnesota, I have my growing up years, I have trees and lakes and books. I remember the woods, the birds, the rock beaches of the North Shore. I remember chasing goats and lightning with my best friend and jumping on the trampoline. I remember winter every year, my world bewitched into a snow globe. Because when I think of home, I think of snow. Snow is moldable. I can fall back upon it, make an angel imprint of my form. I can stamp myself onto the earth. But eventually, it will melt. Spring will waltz in and chase away the snow and that mark will disappear into the dirt. As I wander through my snow-encrusted memories, I realize every one of them has disappeared. And I wonder, is the idea of home constant? Is it irrevocable, tied to your birthplace or the four walls which surround you? Or is it more transitory, something that can be shaped but must also change? In about a year’s time, I will be living in Ohio once more. Thirteen years of my life will be neatly packaged into “that time I lived in the tundra.” I will exchange forests and rivers for cornfields and narrow roads. Nobody will know the city of Coon Rapids and I’ll forget where Cincinnati is. They won’t know what it means to “go up north.” They won’t know why I love and hate winter so much. And it won’t snow as much. I’m wishing home would stick to my fingers like the ice outside my window. I wonder how I’ll learn to let go, if I can learn to associate home with anything else. think of cat’s fur and wool. A soft sun pulsed behind the gray. I felt the air, tasted it, held it. Winter is the sound of silence. It sat around the cars and buildings, evenly and heavily. I breathed in the clearness of it and, closing my eyes, thought I was back home. Eight hundred miles from Minnesota, I stretched out my hand to catch the same kind of snowflakes which got stuck in my bedroom window screens. They followed the same six-pointed design and melted in the same way. They tasted the same and decorated my hair the same. And I realized, when I think of home, I think of snow. Home is a place, but home is also a feeling, a feeling of comfort and familiarity. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” While a beautiful quote, I wonder if it’s quite so simple as “home is where the heart is.” For where precisely is my heart? Is it crystallized into the giant snow piles towering over the Walmart parking lot? Is it woven into Christmas and a street lamp from Narnia? Is it found in the name “Minnesota” or in “Ohio”? Maybe it lies where I have the most memories. But what if they are split between two places? How do you determine the better half? In Ohio, I have family and my university. Each semester, I engrave new memories onto my heart, carving out new handholds on the mountain of life. My grandparents’ house becomes more vibrant and joyful. I remember my childhood before
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