On Going Home and the Passing of Time

Me during a blizzard in Springfield, Missouri (Feb. 2025)

My kids – one in 8th grade and one in 4th grade – were on break from their NYC public schools last week and we spent the time off in Springfield, Missouri, like we do nearly every February, visiting my parents who retired there in 2013. I can almost never mention to anyone that my parents live in Springfield, Missouri without making clear that I didn’t grow up there, which is obnoxious of me, I know. I did, however, go to college in Springfield, from 1994-1998 and then I lived there for another two years working odd jobs and raising my kitten, Simone, who was born behind a dumpster by the parking lot of the seedy apartment complex I lived in when I was 22. It was when I was in college, drunk off independence and Zimas, that I suggested to my parents, who lived in Germany at the time, that they should buy a house in Springfield and retire there eventually. For some reason they listened to me and now, nearly thirty years later, I bring my husband and kids to Springfield twice a year to visit – a biannual reminder to me to really think an idea through before sharing it.

Itty Bitty Simone (age two weeks) and me, 1999.

It’s not that Springfield is bad. It’s perfectly fine! Nearly all my memories involving Springfield are good ones and there are lots of things to love about the town. It’s right in the heart of the Ozarks, one of the prettiest areas in the country – bursting with rolling green hills, expansive skies that showcase unparalleled sunsets every night, with lakes and ponds and rugged cliffs for days. But it’s also a deeply conservative area, located in the buckle of the Bible Belt, with twenty-three times more white people than any other ethnicity. Sometimes when I’m there, it feels as if just existing as I am is a personal affront to the implicit values of the area, and all I am is a typical straight white woman with strong opinions that differ from the area norm.

So, there’s that, and then there’s the inevitable observation every six months of the ways my parents seem a little bit older, maybe a little less steady, since the last time I saw them, which is another layer that anyone who has watched a parent age in any way other than relatively smoothly is familiar with. This year, on top of these things, we were snowed in for a couple days while a blizzard whipped through the Ozarks and temps dropped to below zero. And to top it off, the visit began with a medical emergency involving my dad two hours after we arrived to town. He’s fine now, thankfully, but paramedics were called, and for a couple minutes at least, it wouldn’t have been dramatic to imagine the worst (and I did).

Two days before our visit, I was out on a walk and a couple blocks from home, I passed a little tree filled with clip-on ornamental cardinals. It was a path I had walked along a million times and had never noticed the cardinals and when I did I got a channeled message that I would soon be facing something scary but I would be protected by my loved ones on the other side (cardinals are one of my “signs” they send me.*).

I immediately imagined that the scary thing would involve driving. Specifically, I thought that the two-hour drive in a rental car from the airport in Arkansas to my parents’ home in Springfield might present an unforeseeable issue. We live in Brooklyn and don’t own a car and I drive so infrequently that it always take a little time to “warm up” when I do get behind a wheel. I also don’t like driving at night and part of the drive from the airport would be after sunset.

But I took the cardinals as a good omen and I remembered them when I saw a flock – or, a conclave, I guess is more accurate – of cardinals flying alongside us on the highway for a good 45 minutes of our drive to Springfield. We were protected – I didn’t need to worry. Sure enough, we got to my parents’ house safely – and I took a deep inhale and thought “All’s well that ends well.”

Except, it wasn’t the ending! After we got to my parents’ house, the six of us went out for dinner and it was there that my dad had his medical episode, and I won’t go into detail but I’ll say it got scary. For a few minutes, it was very scary. My kids were there, they saw the whole thing and were really freaked out for a bit, I was freaked out, my mom – it was scary. It was one of those moments where everything kind of flashes before you and you think “oh, this is how it ends” and you’re never ready. How can you ever be ready.

Maybe that’s another layer that adds to the complexity of visiting this town that is kind of home but not really home. My roots there don’t go all the way back to childhood, but I have enough history now in Springfield and I spent enough of my formative youth there and my parents are going to die there and when I visit, I’m reminded of all of that. I’m reminded of the passing of time – how I wasn’t quite 18 years old when I moved there for college and now I’m pushing 50. It’s where I found my kitten, Simone, and then I took her to Chicago with me and then to New York and she died a very old lady at 19+ and that was already years ago now. It goes by so fast.

Family of cardinals on my parents’ deck, Feb. 2025

Last week, after the blizzard when enough of the roads had been plowed that it was safe to get out, I drove Drew and the kids and myself to Battlefield Mall. My mom had given each kid money to shop and although Jackson, my 13-year-old, wasn’t interested in spending it, he was totally onboard with wandering around by himself while Drew and I took Joanie to try on spring clothes (because it’s important to dress for the life you want). My first time to Battlefield Mall was the summer of 1993, when I was 16 years old, and my parents brought me to Springfield to check out the college there. I’d never lived in the States before – I’d spent my childhood living on or near military bases in Korea, Japan, and Germany – and the thought of a normal American adolescence and young adulthood so close I could taste it was overpowering. I remember thinking that this mall and everything it represented to me at the time was really fucking cool. I felt on the cusp of… something.

At one point during our 90-minute visit to Battlefield Mall last week, Drew and Joanie and I passed Jackson as he was wandering independently. We saw him before he noticed us and in that moment before we called his name, before he belonged back to us, while he was still maybe a little tipsy on independence in the way a 13-year-old exploring a new place on his own can be, I saw my younger self walking those same floors again, passing the same Auntie Anne’s, the same Great American Cookie, the same Old Navy and Express and Dillards I shopped at while I in college 30 years ago.

I sent a message to my younger self in that moment, across timelines. I told her that that feeling of being on the cusp of something never goes away. “For the next thirty years,” I told her, “you’re always going to feel like something is about to happen and most of the time nothing does. But sometimes, every once in a while, something does happen, and you’re lucky,” I said, “because that something is almost always good. And when it’s not, because this is life and sometimes things happen that aren’t so great, it’ll work out eventually.” And then I told her one more thing just because I thought I should: not every idea is meant to be shared. (But I almost hope she doesn’t hear me.).

*Resources:
Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe is (NYTimes bestseller) book by Laura Lynn Jackson, renowned psychic medium who “teaches us how to recognize and interpret the life-changing messages from loved ones and spirit guides on the Other Side.” I recommend this book for anyone interested in learning to recognize and interpret communication from the Other Side, including those grieving departed loved ones.