Welcome Home. Again.
What are we doing here, exactly?
Welcome to Home Again, a newsletter by me, Sarah Powers. I’m so glad you’re here. Read on for a little more about how I hope to show up in this space, and hit the subscribe button below if you’d like to receive my posts in your inbox. Glad you’re here!
A native and a newcomer.
At the age of 40, in the confusing early months of a global pandemic, I moved with my family back to the town I grew up in. I’d been living elsewhere (several elsewheres, actually) for exactly 22 years.
Since that move, I’ve reflected on what it means to be ‘new in town’ in a place I once knew intimately. As we settled in and the pandemic restrictions lifted, I took morning walks past a house I lived in in second grade; I enrolled my children in new-to-them schools that I attended myself decades ago; at least once a month I nearly ran a stop sign near our home because no such stop sign was there in 1996, when I learned to drive these roads.
Every hi-nice-to-meet-you-where-are-you-from conversation I had with a new acquaintance found me commenting on this perplexing dual experience of being at once a native and a newcomer. I was entering into community with people I’d never met, and also with people I sat across from in high school English class but hadn’t seen in 25 years. I was from here/not from here in the same sentence, familiar with and disoriented by the same winding roads.
More to say, and not just about where I live.
The idea of writing about moving back to the old hometown arrived slowly, alongside shifts in my other creative work and a desire to return to personal narrative and essay writing. So there’s a ‘home again’ happening in my writing life as well: it’s been several many years since I’ve written consistently anywhere, and this land of Substack feels both familiar (like the blogging days I cut my teeth in) and also uncomfortably new.
So what are we doing here, exactly?
Great question. Home Again is a free newsletter inspired by my experience returning to the town I grew up in after two decades away. I’m interested in what it means to be of a place, living in a place, and actively engaged in making that place home.
Home Again is also a space for me to return home to the practice of writing, which means that often I’ll have things to say here that have nothing to do with moving home. Because it’s fun to wander off topic, too, right?
If you’d like to come along, hit Subscribe below and my posts will be delivered to the email address of your choice (you can also read them in the Substack app - my preferred experience - or in a browser).
If you have more questions or still aren’t sure how you ended up reading these words, check out these Frequently Asked Questions.
Thanks for being here.
