I touched down in Detroit exactly one week until Lindsay got married. I was (mostly) full of sheer hype to get to spend loads of time with her, but the rest of my brain was consumed with being home for two weeks. This part of the world has the ability to grow my heart eight sizes too big or absolutely crush me with grief. I was steadying myself to be open to whatever came my way.
We were fortunate enough to stay on the family farm with my 93 year old grandmother in the house she was born in. A giant farmhouse had plenty of room for us and I was emotional seeing Penn run until ragged, feeding the fish with my Uncle Nick, making waffles with my dad, and delivering the paper from the end of the quarter mile lane (via golf cart!) to my grandmother’s lap on Thursdays. It felt like maybe, this time, this visit would be different. Maybe it would illuminate the pieces of our life that seemed out of place, give us clarity, help us understand our nomad life and why we’re starting to feel tired of moving around so much.
But first, I had to get my best friend married.
I met Lindsay in Mrs. Wright’s class in 5th grade. I had just moved from Toledo to Bedford and knew no one. Lindsay was wearing this fire Tiny Toons jersey shirt and I immediately thought she was the coolest person, something that hasn’t changed in the nearly 30 years I’ve known her.
It’s not crazy to know someone that long, but now 38, I realize the absolute brilliance and luck that has to happen to continue to know and love someone for that long. Lindsay has been there for everything in my life: the tiny subtle moments where we passed notes in high school, partied in our separate college towns, bopped around Target a million times, to the big ones when my mom died in junior year, my jubilee (wedding), the birth of my son. To know someone that long and to love them that long is a gift: it’s rare and dizzying in the best of ways.
The wedding week was filled with who Jack and Lindsay love and who love them: a beautiful group of some of the most interesting, kind, smart, talented people I’ve ever met. I blubbered like a babe when they exchanged vows, completely overwhelmed and eclipsed by the life they had built.
Witnessing Lindsay and Jack’s life in this frame amplified the feeling of belonging that I’ve been searching for and failing to find for so long. It gave us a lot to talk about and contemplate as we try and figure out what makes sense to our family. The idea of place and community seems so easy for them. I can’t help but wish that for us, too. There is so much appeal to staying and figuring it out: the mess, the unwinding, marveling at what can grow when you decide to nurture a life in just one place.
Their first dance song happened to be the soundtrack to a very cheesy video compilation of us surprising our favorites almost 7 years ago, a love song to where we are from, where we always feel pulled back to, sometimes against our will. It felt like the universe giving us permission to live whatever kind of life we want, even if it lands us right back where we started.
I blabbed a love letter to Lindsay for her wedding gift like we always do, a smushed-up, slightly more sophisticated version of our notes in middle school and high school, lamenting on the notion that some people feel like home more than a house or a place, and I’m so happy she found Jack as her home. But what I didn’t say is that Lindsay has always felt like home to me, maybe more than a place ever will. And for that, I’m beyond grateful to just know her.
Since 5th grade.
