This weekend, I popped by my alma mater for a few hours to briefly catch up with some people that went through the same foreign exchange program I did. Of the few (of hundreds) that brought themselves to a small, rural Wisconsin town from the far reaches of the globe – there are a handful I have a great fondness for.

These are the people that were successfully developing interfaces and other digital media professionally before I knew it was even an option. People that leave a wake.

The whole time, Hugh Macleod‘s above cartoon was stuck in my head ¹.

I spent the drive home reflecting on my decade-long path and was getting a little down on myself that ‘home’ wasn’t some place ‘exotic’. That despite my many times across the ocean, I’m blocks from where my family had roots for 110 years. Making the shear possibility, of ever calling a distant land home feel more distant than ever.

Then as I pulled around the corner, the boy spotted me, and ran around the yard to greet me in the drive way. Laughing and screaming the whole way.

Home is wherever I hear his laugh.

Elsewhere:

“I’ve always, as an adult, lived in a place where I was a transplant, and other people were natives. In NY, I am a native. I actually live in the place where I come from. There are small cues. Like the smell of the ocean at sunrise, and how it reminds me of waking up in my grandmother’s house in Rockaway. ” – Dave Winer

1. The appropriate-ness of it didn’t come through until I re-read his post a few moments ago.