Homeception is when you take your new home and park it in the driveway beside your childhood home so that when you look out your dining room window, you are staring into the kitchen of your youth. This is the same view you’d have from the childhood home’s own dining room only reversed.

A mirror. A reflection.

Fifteen years ago, my parents decided they wanted a separate garage. (My Dad decided he wanted a separate garage. Mom mostly wanted new carpet to replace the matted, brown 80’s semi-shag which sorta looked like they’d floored the place with wookie scalps. This was a thing. Kind of like avocado used to be an appliance color and not something you put on toast.)

In order to make this new garage idea work, they needed to place it behind the house. This required, as my then three year old son reported, a “road” wrapping around to the backyard.

Fifteen years later, it turns out the “road” is an excellent landing pad for Discovery. There’s a water faucet nearby and even a 30 amp power socket. And while there is no sewer connection, we could, in the dead of night, divert our black tank into their nearby garden and re-enact scenes from The Martian.

But as appetizing as eating poo veggies sounds, I imagine we’ll do our best to not fill the tanks and stick to using the indoor plumbing before we depart on our adventure. Though with the sudden haziness of the arrow of time, I’m struggling to understand when that departure will actually take place.

I first thought we made the move official last week when we parked Discovery at a resort close to our rental house to use as a final staging area. However, even then, it didn’t quite feel official until we handed the keys to our landlord at the end of the same week. That day, we headed north, which surely should’ve have been the defining moment. However, parked beside my parent’s house, I hadn’t felt like we’d started yet.

Discovery was trapped in stasis. A holding pattern. What the Next Gen crew might call a “temporal anomaly”.

Slightly elevated in our massive motorhome, I was staring down through a window decorated with my lumpy childhood pottery watching my parents do the dishes. The out of body experience only reinforced that this move has been a never ending process. An event horizon we’ve been falling infinitely toward, timeless and unreal.

Surely when I drop my son off at college, the move will have ended. Without him here though, the idea of “home” seems even more elusive. But above the same kitchen window I was looking in sits a darkened room where I used to sleep…

Maybe home isn’t a place you find but a place you leave when you’ve grown and learned and lived and loved long enough to carry that comfort into the vast unknown. And out there, you start again with those same foundations. Always moving. Always home.

Image available through creative commons license, CC BY 2.0, Kohei Kanno, Flickr

Categories: Discovery