Home Salty Home

They say you can't go home again, yet apparently you can always go back to the grocery store.

By Zach Hively

We people sure like to romanticize travel, huh? The possibilities of the open road. The joy of the airport greeting. The certainty that—wherever we go—there will be a McDonald’s with a bathroom.
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But we over-romanticize the part where we get home. It’s actually the worst part of travel—aside, of course, from leaving home, and from getting where we’re going, and from realizing when we get there that we’re far too tired to enjoy ourselves. The WORST.

Oh, we pretend we like coming home. “It feels good to be home, though,” we lie to everyone who asks about our travels.

No. We say this just so we don’t rub their faces in our travel the way we used to by showing them slides.

​Sure, it feels good to be back in our own familiar haunts, where we know precisely where to find fresh toilet paper. And sure, it feels good to use our own pillow we’ve been breaking in for years now instead of some fancy new hotel pillow that makes us wonder how the rest of the world manages to sleep at night.

But it does NOT feel good to realize we have to go to the grocery store.

We never budget for this step in coming home. All travel beyond our own county line consumes every last oomph of our available giddyup. It frankly doesn’t much matter if we’re zoned out on a transoceanic flight after an extended stay abroad, or if we simply missed our exit and didn’t realize it for a few hours because this podcast was really engaging, okay? By the laws of the conservation of energy, we have no energy left to conserve once we get within turn-off-the-GPS range of home.

​So even if we think we should maybe stop by the store on our way home, we don’t. We are certain we have something to eat for breakfast tomorrow, because we are CAPABLE. We have just done many capable things to prove our capabilityness. Things like exchanging currencies and changing the dashboard clock when we drove across time zones.

Yet we know, we know in our world-weary bones, that we will not be capable of handling the self-checkout machines repeating “Please place your … ITEM … in the bag.”

Walking in the front door brings on sweet relief—at first. It does feel good to be back. Our home is in order. We are not Bilbo Baggins, presumed dead with all our belongings up for auction. We are not Odysseus, our house overrun with mortal enemies trying to marry our wife. But these stories capture an essential, universal truth about coming home to great upheaval, which we experience when we realize just how hungry we are.

We open the fridge to find either:

• Bountiful, if limp and discolored, evidence of our pre-travel overambition in the produce section, or
  
• Half a cream cheese, some barbecue sauce, and one avocado that is somehow still not ripe.
  

This can’t be right. We know we set ourselves up better than this. But the cabinet isn’t much better: one box of bowtie pasta (no sauce), one can of black beans, an abundance of cereal that has the words “wheat” or “grain” on the boxes (but no milk in that fridge), some hot chocolate mix forgotten from winters past, and a lone ketchup packet.

Oh, and the salt shaker on the counter. The pepper, empty.

Romanticize that.

At this point, the mere thought of interacting with another human long enough to hand off a bag of dinner is too much to bear. So we scrape together enough willpower to heat water for the hot chocolate. We take it to bed. Our bed, at last. And we fall asleep before it cools enough to enjoy.