Pennsylvania Homesick Blues

I'm in my own kitchen, and I don't know where anything is.

"Where are the spoons?"

"That drawer," my mother says, not looking up from the newspaper.

"Which drawer?" I ask, mildly irritated.

She looks up, maybe hearing my resentment. She points. I open the drawer and retrieve a spoon. She returns to her newspaper. I open the fridge and get the milk.

"Mom?"

"Huh?" she asks, distracted.

"Where's the cereal?"

We both sigh.

It's not the end of the world. My father changed jobs spring of my sophomore year of high school and began working in Harrisburg. My mother and I stayed in Bethesda, Md., so I could finish high school in the same place I'd started it. He commuted home on weekends. And after I graduated, they moved.

So I'm in Harrisburg this summer. "Home." My friends are all back in Maryland. I remember the first jolt of jealousy, when I received an e-mail message from a friend enthusiastically recounting a night out. In Bethesda. At home. And here I am, eating in an unfamiliar kitchen. Every night, I go to sleep staring at the unfamiliar ceiling of my own bedroom. It's funny how you can get used to a ceiling. Behind the house, when the moon is full, sometimes I hear a chorus of unfamiliar dogs.

Even weirder than pure unfamiliarity is the jolt of seeing old things in new places. Packing is the process of looking at accumulated junk and asking, What is this? Why does it take up space in my life? What on earth possessed me to keep my third grade English papers? Why do I have a snow globe collection?

The things that survived this packing process are the things that jar me now. The first time I saw the snow globe collection after it was unpacked was Thanksgiving break. I went down the stairs to retrieve something for my mother. Turning a corner, I found myself presented with an elaborate configuration of plastic domes. My mother had unpacked them. Look, I thought, a souvenir of every place I've ever visited--every amusement park rollercoaster I've ever been on. What is it doing here? It belongs on the second shelf of my bookcase, in my bedroom.

And the distance from the bookcase to the bed should be exactly four paces. I long for the precision of space I know. Now, missing the feel of moving through darkness with confidence, I turn the lights on when I get a midnight urge to wander. Am I afraid of bruising the white walls? Or am I afraid they will bruise me? Before, I could navigate a labyrinth of rooms and corridors in pitch-blackness. I had breathed it in so thoroughly that I had even memorized which wooden floorboards murmured at my step. Silence was easy. That house was comfortable, settled, older.

This one squeaks with shallow newness, walls too white and paint too fresh. For years, I complained about the rosy glow of my old pink bedroom. Pink wallpaper, pink canopy bed, pink curtains. Six when I picked the hue, I lived with it for 12 years. I quickly tired of it, but never convinced my parents to change it. Now, staring at the plain white walls of my new home, I miss the overwhelming, childish wash of color, remembering how my voice echoed off pinkness in that room. There is something institutional about these walls. Bigger and lighter and emptier and colorless, this house, in spite of its more modern subtleties. It's a house whose rooms have not yet taken in their owners. A young house. The hedges in the front look like weeds. I never realized before how much I loved the wealth of trees around my house. Here, the trees are saplings, providing no shade from an unblinking sun.

And driving through strange neighborhoods, waiting at stoplights whose pauses I do not know, again I am struck by the absence of variance, of movement, of the spectrum I unknowingly came to treasure in my cosmopolitan childhood home. I am alone here. Always accused of being a magnet for disease, a walking accident, it occurs to me that I may have unconsciously picked up another malady.

Homesickness, like seasickness, rocks you. And so in the stillness of Harrisburg, I am moved.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan '02, a Crimson editor, will live in Lowell House next year.