Wandering. Meandering. Adventuring. Road tripping. For a website revolving around a home, a property, and a place, Rosslyn Redux certainly embraces plenty of peripateticism. Rooted roving? Seems contradictory, right? Perhaps not. Today’s Bloganuary prompt, directing me contemplate past road trips, might advance a glimmer of insight. Let’s find out.
Think back on your most memorable road trip.
My “most memorable road trip”? That’s a bit like asking me to find the purist blue of a bluebird sky. Or the loftiest snow on a perfect powder day. Too many choices. So many tempting reveries — seasonal migrations between Essex and Santa Fe, for example — inviting me to daydream and chronicle.
There’s that ready-to-go anticipation. Setting out on road trips with pent up wanderlust and enthusiasm for the unexplored, the unknown.
Griffin saying goodbye to his snowy home before setting off on a Christmas road trip.
(Source: December 2014)
Returning from road trips, ready to embrace family, home, and stillness.
Coming home to my puppy after 15 days and 5k miles on the road. I missed you too, Carley!
— Geo Davis aka @virtualdavis (Source: Instagram)
Carley welcomed me home after a mid-pandemic road trip. Perfect homecoming after two surreal weeks of COVID-19 dodging logistics.
— Geo Davis (Source: Pandemic Puppy: Carley Corona)
I open with the beginning and ending of roads trips in part because both are rooted at Rosslyn. And I will close with a photo essay of a 2013 road trip to help create visual connection, a conceptual bridge, between the beginnings and endings of a road trip. Maybe the images I’ve chosen will help illuminate my hypothesis that rooted roving and portable homeness aren’t oxymorons. That home and road trip are not so antithetical as they might initially seam.
Rooted Road Trip
Caveat lector: As so often with these Bloganuary prompts, I’m bending the bounds of the proposed blog post. If you’ve grown weary with my meditations on the concept of home, that’s totally understandable. I suggest you skip ahead.
If you’re still with me, thank you.
How then might the concept of home, universal and/or personal conceptions of homeness, have anything whatsoever to do with a memorable road trip?
You see, today’s prompt resonates with a question that I’ve been asking myself for some years now, a question that I believe I’m finally beginning to answer. Is home portable, or is it affixed to a building, property, or something physical and rooted?
Consider for a moment that the first thread in the interwoven tapestry I call Rosslyn Redux was Wanderlust to Houselust. I had been nomadic by nature and appetite prior to setting down roots with Susan at Rosslyn. A road trip might well serve as a meaningful metaphor for much of my pre-Rosslyn life. I was vagabondish. Happily vagabondish. Home wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about. But I was increasingly aware that something was shifting inside me. Our Rosslyn decision was a huge leap for both of us, more impulsive than we were accustomed to be. But we knew in our hearts, our guts, that it was the right choice at the right time.
Fast forward a decade and a half.
Homeness, my personal conception of home, although still in flux, continues to grow and evolve as we come to understand that our home is (and has been for quite some time) actually in two physical locations, one on the Adirondack Coast and one in the high desert Southwest. And even when road tripping, migrating between one place and the other, I experience homeness in our little family of three (Susan, Carley, and me) emerging in unlikely locales all across the country, as if home isn’t tied to place at all. The road trip itself is a sort of home when we’re together, an interstitial home that we create simply by navigating and experiencing the world together. Perhaps…
Road Trip 2013
Now, for that photo essay I promised.
What do you think?