The Long Way Home

An Essay in Four Rooms

ROOM ONE

There are some mornings that seem so ordinary while you're living them that you almost forget they're happening.

This morning was one of those.

The coffee was hot. The house was quiet in the way a familiar house is quiet, not empty, but settled. Somewhere in another room I could hear the soft sounds that always seem to accompany the beginning of a day. Nothing remarkable was happening. There wasn't a life-changing conversation waiting for me or some great revelation that had arrived overnight. It was simply another morning, beginning the way so many mornings have before it.

As I wrapped my hands around my coffee mug, I found myself thinking about home.

Not my house.

Home.

It's a funny word when you stop and let it linger for a while. Ask ten people what home means and you'll probably hear ten different answers. Some will point to a town on a map. Others will tell you it's wherever the people they love happen to be. Some might describe a front porch, a family recipe, a favorite chair, or the smell of something baking in the oven.

I've discovered that the older I get, the less convinced I am that home is something you can point to.

I think it's something you recognize.

That wasn't always true.

Growing up in the Midwest, I never questioned what home was because I never had a reason to. It was simply the place where my parents were, where my sister and I grew up, where school and church and music lessons all fit together into the predictable rhythm of everyday life. Like most kids, I assumed everyone experienced the world more or less the way I did. You don't spend much time examining the air around you when you've never had to breathe anything different.

When I look back now, though, I realize that many of the memories I treasure most aren't tied to a particular address. They're tied to rooms.

I remember sitting on the living room floor while the familiar hum of the Enterprise filled the television speakers. I didn't know the names of every character yet, but I knew I wanted to spend time with these people. Kirk was on the bridge. Uhura and Spock were at their stations. Somewhere beyond the television screen was a future that felt strangely welcoming, even though I couldn't have explained why.

I remember carrying my saxophone into another rehearsal room and arriving just a little early because I liked those few quiet minutes before everyone else walked through the door. Music stands waited to be used. Chairs still sat in neat rows. There was the unmistakable smell of cork grease, brass, and old sheet music that every musician recognizes instantly. Before anyone played a single note, the room already felt familiar.

At the time, those memories didn't seem connected. One happened in my parents' living room. The other happened in a school rehearsal room. They had nothing in common except that, years later, I found myself returning to them again and again without really understanding why.

Maybe memory works that way.

Maybe it isn't collecting places as much as it's collecting moments that quietly begin to feel like places. Maybe that's why, when I think about home now, I don't picture a map. I picture rooms. Rooms where people gathered. Rooms where conversations happened. Rooms where I learned something about the world without realizing I was learning it at all.

It would take me years to understand what all of those rooms had been giving me. At the time, they simply felt familiar. Looking back now, I think they were quietly teaching me something that has taken most of my life to put into words.

The places I've carried with me the longest aren't necessarily the places where I lived.

They're the places that invited me to become a little more myself.

ROOM TWO

I don't remember the day the studio became home.

I suppose that's fitting because I don't think places become home all at once. They earn that distinction quietly, almost without asking for it. One ordinary day folds into another until, years later, you find yourself remembering not a single remarkable moment, but the feeling of being there.

When I first opened my studio, I was thinking like a young teacher. I wanted every lesson to be organized, every student to make steady progress, and every parent to feel confident that they had entrusted their child to the right person. I spent hours choosing music, planning lessons, and thinking about technique. I wanted to be prepared because I believed good teaching meant always having the answers.

It didn't take very long for my students to gently convince me otherwise.

Every afternoon began in much the same way. I'd hear voices in the hallway before the next lesson. A knock on the door. An instrument case set carefully on the floor. A backpack dropped beside a chair. Sometimes the music came out first. Sometimes the stories did. There were tales about school, friendships, auditions, funny things that had happened during the week, and the occasional frustration that simply couldn't wait until after scales. We always made our way to the lesson, but we didn't always begin with the music.

Looking back, I'm grateful we didn't.

Those first few minutes reminded me, week after week, that there was a person sitting in front of me before there was ever a musician. Music gave us something wonderful to work on together, but it was never the only thing happening in that room. Confidence was quietly growing alongside tone quality. Perseverance was learning to share a stand with frustration. Patience was developing one measure at a time, usually without either of us noticing until weeks or months had passed.

It's funny what memory decides to keep.

I couldn't tell you every solo we worked on or every scale we practiced, but I can still hear the room. I remember the excitement in a student's voice when something finally clicked after weeks of trying. I remember the disappointment that followed an audition that hadn't gone the way we'd hoped and the smile that eventually found its way back after we talked about what came next. I remember parents waiting patiently, asking how the lesson had gone before they ever asked how much music we'd covered. I remember laughter echoing down the hallway because someone had made a mistake that, five minutes later, had become everyone's favorite part of the day.

Those are the sounds that stayed with me.

After the last lesson had ended, I'd usually spend a few minutes putting the room back together. A music stand would be straightened and returned to its place. Lesson books would find their way back onto the shelf. My coffee mug would finally make its way to my backpack. There was no urgency to any of it. I simply liked being in the room after it had grown quiet again. It never felt empty. If anything, it felt wonderfully full, as though the conversations, the laughter, and the music had settled into the walls and decided to stay a little longer.

For years, I thought I had built a place where students came to learn music.

Looking back now, I think we were building something much more difficult to describe.

Without ever setting out to, we had created a room where people could arrive exactly as they were. Some left playing their instrument a little better than when they walked in. I hope all of us left carrying something even more valuable than that. I know I did. Every student who walked through that door taught me something about patience, resilience, courage, or joy, and somewhere along the way I realized that the lessons moving across the room weren't traveling in just one direction.

By the time I locked the door each evening, I wasn't simply leaving my studio.

I was leaving another place that had quietly become home.

ROOM THREE

For a long time, I thought the studio was the only room I would ever build.

It never occurred to me that, years later, I would find myself sitting at a keyboard instead of a music stand, hoping that a few honest words might do for someone else what so many conversations had done for me. When I started writing Jibber Jabber with Jodi, I wasn't trying to create a community. I wasn't thinking about building anything at all. I simply wanted a place to collect the thoughts that had a habit of following me around until I finally wrote them down. If someone else happened to read them, I considered that a bonus. If they quietly disappeared into the internet without anyone noticing, that seemed perfectly acceptable, too.

Then, little by little, something unexpected began to happen.

Someone would leave a comment telling me they had never thought about a topic quite that way before. Another person would share a story of their own. Every so often, an email would arrive from someone I'd never met, yet somehow it felt as though we had been continuing a conversation that had started years earlier.

One message in particular has stayed with me ever since I read it. It wasn't long or especially poetic. It simply ended with the words, "I thought I was the only one." I remember reading that sentence more than once before setting my laptop down and just sitting there for a while. It struck me that, for all the differences between teaching music and writing essays, they were both inviting people into the same kind of room. One happened to have music stands and saxophones. The other had paragraphs and coffee. Both began the same way. Someone walked through the door hoping they might leave carrying something they didn't have when they arrived.

Around the same time, something similar was happening through Star Trek. What had spent years being a story I loved quietly became a way of meeting people I never would have known otherwise. Some of those conversations lasted an hour. Others have stretched across years. We certainly talked about captains, episodes, impossible moral dilemmas, and all the wonderfully nerdy things that make Star Trek fans smile, but I've noticed those conversations almost never stay there. Somehow they always find their way to grief, hope, courage, family, kindness, or the choices we're all trying to make in our own lives. Looking back now, I don't think the stories were ever the destination. They were simply the invitation. The real gift was discovering friends who slowly became family because we had learned to listen to one another with curiosity instead of certainty.

As I think about those years now, I'm struck by how familiar they feel. The rooms had changed. One held music stands. Another held a laptop. Others existed around dinner tables, on video calls, or in conversations that lingered long after anyone remembered how they had begun. The furniture was different. The walls were different. Even the people were different. And yet every one of those rooms carried the same feeling. They were places where no one expected perfection. They made room for questions that didn't have immediate answers. They welcomed laughter, disagreement, stories, and silence with equal generosity. Most of all, they reminded me that the best conversations don't end when someone has won an argument. They end when everyone leaves seeing the world just a little differently than when they walked in.

It has taken me a long time to understand why those places have stayed with me, but I think I'm finally beginning to. Every room that has ever felt like home has asked remarkably little of me. It has never demanded that I prove myself before I belonged. Instead, it quietly invited me to show up, to listen well, to share honestly, and to leave carrying a little more than I brought through the door. Looking back over the years, I don't think I was collecting places nearly as much as I was collecting people, and wherever enough of those people gathered with kindness, curiosity, and room for one another, home somehow had a way of finding me again.

ROOM FOUR

When I sat down with my coffee that morning, I thought I was thinking about places.

Somewhere between remembering my parents' house, a rehearsal room, my music studio, old friends, new friends, and conversations that had stayed with me long after they ended, I realized I hadn't really been thinking about places at all. I had been thinking about people. More specifically, I'd been thinking about the people who had quietly changed the way I moved through the world without ever trying to.

The funny thing is, I don't remember any of them sitting me down to explain how life worked.

My parents didn't.

My students didn't.

The friends who have become family through a shared love of Star Trek certainly didn't.

None of them handed me a map or told me where I was supposed to end up. Instead, they did something far more generous. They listened. They encouraged. They laughed with me. They challenged me when I needed it. They made room for questions that didn't always have immediate answers, and somehow, without any of us recognizing it at the time, those ordinary moments accumulated into a life.

I think that's why memory is such a remarkable thing.

It has a way of ignoring the moments we were convinced would define us and quietly preserving the ones that actually did.

It remembers the voices drifting in from another room while I sat on the living room floor watching Star Trek. It remembers the sound of students talking in the hallway before a lesson began. It remembers conversations that lingered because no one was quite ready to leave, emails that arrived from people I'd never met but somehow already understood, and mornings that began with coffee before either of us had said very much at all. None of those moments asked for my attention while I was living them. They simply happened. Only now, years later, can I see how faithfully memory gathered them together, almost as though it knew I would need them someday.

Maybe that's why I've stopped worrying quite so much about where I belong.

For a long time, belonging felt like something I was supposed to find. I imagined there would come a day when I would finally arrive, look around, and know with absolute certainty that I had reached the place I had been searching for. Looking back now, I smile at that younger version of myself because she was searching for something that had been quietly growing around her all along. Every lesson, every conversation, every friendship, every story, every ordinary morning had been adding another piece to a life that already felt remarkably like home. She just didn't know enough yet to recognize it.

As those thoughts wandered through my mind, I looked up from my coffee and noticed how familiar everything felt. The house was still quiet. Morning light was finding its way through the windows the way it had thousands of times before. Across the table sat the woman who has shared this life with me, and for a few moments neither of us felt any particular need to fill the silence. It wasn't an extraordinary morning. Nothing memorable had happened. There wasn't a grand revelation waiting for us before the day could begin.

It was simply another ordinary day.

And then, almost without thinking, I smiled.

After all these years of wondering where home might be, after all the rooms I had walked into and all the conversations I had been fortunate enough to share, I realized I wasn't searching anymore.

I had been carrying it with me all along.

I picked up my coffee, looked across the table, and before I could even finish the thought, the words quietly found me.

"Oh..."

I was already home.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.