Strange homecoming

Absence can turn the familiar into the unfamiliar, the unchanged into the changed 

Returning home after being away for two months, I wonder if it is indeed a homecoming. 

I put on a switch to turn on a fan. Instead a light comes on. I try another switch, another light, no fan. Third switch, a fan starts revolving. 

In the kitchen I can’t find the coffee. I finally discover it, tucked away behind a jar of pickles. 

I turn on the electric kettle to make the coffee, and I can’t find my coffee mug. 

Everything seems strange and unfamiliar. The sizes and shapes of the rooms. The arrangement of the furniture. Was that table lamp always there, or somewhere else? And weren’t there different cushions on the divan than these?

It’s as though some mischievous sprite has come into the house, and changed around the furniture and furnishings, rewired the electrical switches so that I don’t know which is which, hidden the coffee and coffee mug just in order to confuse and disorient me and make me wonder if the home I think I’ve returned to is really my home, or that of some perfect stranger. 

I’m not the only one feeling a sense of displacement, of not knowing where I am, or where the things I’m looking for might be. 

Bunny says she can’t locate her favourite T-shirt, or the shoes she wears when we go for our daily evening walk. Who has hidden them? The same imp of mischief who hid my coffee and my mug? 

And of course the imp playing pranks on us is our own misplaced memory, caused by lengthy absence, which makes us see accustomed things with unaccustomed eyes, puts everyday things in unremembered places, turns routine into the random.  

As the initial strangeness of homecoming begins to wear off, it reaffirms afresh our sense of place, and by doing so, our sense of ourselves. 

We are the ones who made this place a home. And, returning the favour, our home made us who we are. That’s the true homecoming. 

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