Where are we going?

My parents made mental note of my stranger behavior as a child so that they might ask me about it when I was older. One of my odder compulsions was obsessively asking where we were going when we got into the car. This wouldn't be strange if the tone of my question was excited curiosity, but my tone was always one of suspicious foreboding. My parents would always answer "We are going home." and make note to ask me about it when I got older.

Eventually I became old enough that they believed they could ask me about strange childhood behavior, and ask they did, though I don't think they expected the answer they got.

Until I turned six years old my parents and I moved often ... sometimes multiple times in a year. I was, for most of the moves, too young to grasp the preamble of moving, the cleaning, the packing, the boxes everywhere. As a very small child all I knew was one day we got in the car and never went home again.
So, after we moved to Baraboo, every time we took a slightly different route home from the bank or the grocery store I would ask where we were going because I thought that we might not be returning to this house, but instead we might be moving someplace new. Because I had found my heart's home here in Baraboo I was wary of another move and paranoid that my family might leave this town, this home.

I want to know that no matter where my life takes me that I will always have a home here. I want to know that I can always return to the yard where the big Oak tree stands with a plaque remembering the life of our first family pet, where the apple and mulberry trees grow. I want to be able to visit here and watch my children climb the trees I climbed and put them to bed in my old bedroom.

"You can never go home again" seems so cruel. I understand that the world turns and people grow old, older and finally die. Neighborhoods change, and new families move into old homes and start new lives and create new stories, but I have always been an incredibly selfish person. So much of me is wrapped up in this physical place and I don't want to give it up.