Coast to Coast
Is it possible to love two very different places—and to call them both home?
By Sara Holston
A few weeks ago, in a Little Free Library, my goddaughter and her mom discovered a children’s book that I was starting to think I had imagined from my own childhood. It’s called Grandfather’s Journey, and in it the narrator describes his grandfather’s experiences moving back and forth between Japan and San Francisco over the course of his life, falling in love with both places and feeling always caught between the two. The narrator ends up following in his grandfather’s footsteps to California and similarly finds himself torn between his love for both places. At the end of the book, he reflects: “I return now and then, when I cannot still the longing in my heart. The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.” It’s a sad story—but it’s also not.
Let me explain. I first read the story in second grade, and it must have resonated with me, because even though I couldn’t remember the title or the details, I remembered the shape of the story all these years later. I suspect it’s because when I first read it, I had just spent the summer in San Francisco with my family while my dad was working on an extended project there. At eight years old, I had been to very few places in the world, so I seized on the fact that I knew one of those cities—I’d been there, too! I had loved my summer there, so I imagined I understood these characters a little better. That sense of connection turned out to be prescient, and is probably why the story has stuck with me over the last twenty or so years: because it has become my story as well. I’ve made the cross country move between San Francisco and the East Coast no less than four times now, and, despite an initial reluctance each time, I always seem to find myself feeling at home, even as I feel homesick for the coast I’ve left. Home, I’ve found, may be something that happens to you, rather than something that you choose. In my experience, at least, there’s something inevitable about it.
I was born in Philadelphia, and I lived there with my parents and younger sister for the first twelve years of my life (the summer after second grade notwithstanding). I have so many memories of family barbecues and trips to neighborhood playgrounds, and I often felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by echoes of earlier chapters of my family’s story, like the high school my mom attended and the church where my parents were married. As a kid, I didn’t spend much time thinking seriously about what my life would look like when I grew up, but I would have been hard-pressed to imagine it anywhere else. My family had always been in Philadelphia, and it felt part of our DNA.
But after my sixth-grade year, we packed up and moved to San Francisco long-term. When my parents announced the impending move to us at the dinner table, it came as a huge shock. Occasional summers in other places for dad’s job, sure—that’s just like an extended vacation. But moving? Forever? And not just to a new house, but to the other side of the country, a six-hour flight from everything we considered home. It felt like the ultimate plot twist—I thought I knew where the story was going, but now I couldn’t even picture the next few scenes.
That’s the thing about being present somewhere: invest your time and attention in a place for long enough and it starts to become familiar.
The adjustment did not come easily. If you’re not familiar with these cities, let me assure you: they are very different. Many of the things that had always felt like a core part of my life were upended, as the climate shift was accompanied by a perhaps even greater cultural shift. I felt out-of-place, like everything around me was a reminder that I had come from somewhere else, and assailed with doubts: maybe I’d never quite fit with the California vibe. Still missing the home I had left behind, I wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to belong. But over time, we put down new roots—and I fell in love with the Bay Area. I don’t remember, or maybe just can’t explain, exactly how it happened. It wasn’t something I thought much about, but slowly, as we found new favorite spots and hidden gems in the area, I started to feel less like an East Coaster living on the wrong side of the country. The simple act of becoming familiar with the area—growing accustomed to and comfortable with the space and the rhythms of living there—changed it for me forever.
I realized this during my junior year of high school, when my parents started contemplating a move back to the East Coast in pursuit of a different job opportunity for my dad. This time my sister and I were old enough that we were part of the conversation much further in advance. For a few weeks we were unsure whether my dad would take that job, and to the immense surprise of my inner twelve-year-old, I found myself desperately hoping we would stay. This is home now, I found myself thinking, over and over again, as I went for walks to process my thoughts. I admired the way the sun set behind the mountains and looked with new eyes on views of the neighborhood that had become so familiar. That had happened without any effort on my part—or at least without my realizing that I had been putting in effort. That’s the thing about being present somewhere: invest your time and attention in a place for long enough and it starts to become familiar. Then that familiarity—the memories you’ve formed in a place and your sense of connection to it—starts to turn into love.
Ultimately, we did make the move back to the East Coast—back, as it turns out, to the town just outside Philadelphia where I had grown up. Instead of celebrating the return to a place I had hated leaving, I prayed for the opportunity to come back to California when I graduated college. But by then, we were pretty well settled back in Philadelphia. Since I was already familiar with the area, it was easier to fall back into feeling like the East Coast was home than it had been to adjust to the West. My initial feelings of resentment toward the new house and neighborhood quickly faded as they became the place I returned to for every school break. We established new family traditions, and I even learned the secret short cut that made it possible to walk into town from our new house. When I started to think about where I might want to be long term, as a young adult, I found myself imagining life on the East Coast. I could satisfy that longing for California by visiting friends there, I told myself. Surely, I wasn’t particularly driven to be there all the time.
I was putting so much more thought into the kind of life I wanted to build that I noticed when I started to be able to imagine it in California.
But you already know where this is going: the job I found—the perfect job—was back in San Francisco. It was the answer to all those prayers my senior year of high school. But now I didn’t want those prayers answered. Nonetheless, I made the move across the country for the third time, once again determined that this stay would be short and that I would return to the East Coast after only a few years. Thinking of it that way meant that, though frustrating, this move felt less monumental. It wasn’t derailing the story I had imagined for my life; it was just taking me on a brief detour.
The difference with this move, though, is that I do remember when and why I started to fall in love with the city (again). At first, I resisted being fully present in California, despite physically living there. While I loved my job and made friends among my coworkers and enjoyed having adventures in the city with my old friends, my heart was still back East. I still returned home often for family celebrations, and I still made a point to be regularly to be present for gatherings of my college communities back East.
But as I watched, the slow march of familiarity started to hook me in again. When my cousins came out to visit during my work week and asked for ideas of things to do and places to stop, I discovered that I had recommendations everywhere in the city. That familiarity gave rise to a different feeling: belonging. Even a kind of ownership. Realizing that I knew San Francisco made me feel like it was my city. And this time, I was more aware of the way this familiarity was leading my heart to put down roots. I could feel it happening. I was putting so much more thought into the kind of life I wanted to build that I noticed when I started to be able to imagine it in California.
Part of that was because some of the roots I established this time around were new, and fully my own. For example, I found a church community that was as perfect a fit for me as I’ve ever encountered. It was easy to imagine being a member of this community not just for a few years, but for the long haul. I could imagine asking the priest there to officiate my one-day wedding, or calling on the members of my table group for prayer or for help in emergencies. I also stepped in to serve on the tech team, which tapped skills in sound engineering and live mixing that dated back to my high school years. It was the marriage of a passion and somewhat specialized expertise for which I no longer had an outlet, and a deep need in the church. The one-two punch of seeing how the church could play a role in the long-term story of my life and feeling like I had become an integral part of the life of the church prompted me to imagine what it would be like to stay in San Francisco. And as I also got involved in community support and outreach programs in The Tenderloin, I felt like I was starting to find ways to play a role in the life of the city as a citizen—or at any rate, as something more than just another transient resident. It was with both great sorrow and great joy, therefore, that I crossed the continent again two years ago to enroll in graduate school in Boston. It meant leaving a place I had started to think could be home long-term. But it also meant the ability to be present with family and there for commitments that I would have been harder pressed to honor during this season of life. (And I also chose my summer internships to land me back in San Francisco for a few months of each year.)
It isn’t what I would have chosen. It just happened, a consequence of the life I’ve lived and the choices I’ve made.
What all of this told me is that, for me, a place starts to feel like home not just when it becomes a significant chapter of my story, but when I actively become part of the story being told there. It’s how I fell in love with California the first time: by becoming fully integrated into my high school community and leaving a mark on the school and community there. Though I felt like part of the story of my college, Dartmouth (and still do), that’s pretty different from being part of the story of the Upper Valley, the area where the college is located. College, after all, is supposed to be a short time in our lives, to be our home for a little while before we take what we’ve learned out into the wide, wide world. Leaving your alma mater, at least for a while, is a natural part of the story. From there, it was an easy step to see that leaving, as much as staying, can be part of calling a place you love “home.” And my ongoing bicoastal journey has taught me that becoming part of the story of a place can happen whether we intend it to or not. It’s presence that breeds familiarity, which means that you can’t really become familiar with a place without being there, participating in the rhythms and communities of the place, becoming yourself part of the fabric of it. Moreover, taking the time to learn and grow comfortable in a place usually means the community starts to become familiar with you, too. And before you know it, you belong.
Like the characters in Grandfather’s Journey, finding myself torn between two homes has become part of my story. It isn’t what I would have chosen. It just happened, a consequence of the life I’ve lived and the choices I’ve made. I love the East Coast, from Philadelphia to Boston to New Hampshire, and I love San Francisco, too. And since I feel like part of the story of both places, choosing either one at any given time feels like choosing to be absent from significant moments in the story of the other. Maybe it is. And maybe someday, I’ll figure out how to carry that feeling more easily. But either way, I know that I love both places, and I can’t imagine my life being any other way.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark, from photos by ActionVance on Unsplash (Philadelphia skyline), Daniel Abadia on Unsplash (rail cars), Joshua Sortino on Unsplash (Painted Ladies), Leo SERRAT on Unsplash (state house), Dan Mall on Unsplash (Reading Terminal Market), Alexey Komissarov on Unsplash (Golden Gate Bridge), Caleb George on Unsplash (Transamerica Pyramid), Devon Wellesley on Unsplash (Benjamin Franklin Bridge), Nico Smit on Unsplash (USA map), Josh Hild on Unsplash (San Francisco street), Bryan Angelo on Unsplash (Dilworth Park), Wei Zang on Unsplash (Baker-Berry Tower), Brett Wharton on Unsplash (Massachusetts State House), Jeremy Huang on Unsplash (Harvard)
Sara Holston is a student at HLS, and the current Managing Editor of Fare Forward.
