by Kay Hafner

I love living in my hometown. No matter how far-flung our friends get, the Glens Falls area continues to be their destination place for vacations and visits, weddings and funerals, births and baptisms. My husband and I may not be the magnet that draws people here, but it�s fun to be in the path when they come barreling through, as one family did this week and another did a couple months ago.

Right now I don�t mind being one of the ones who came home to roost, but I didn�t start out eager to be a homebody.

A recent review of my yearbook inscriptions reminded me how hard it was to watch friends head off to four-year colleges�from Boston to Buffalo to Berkeley�while I stayed home and went to Adirondack Community College. When these traveling adventurers returned with tales from the outside world, I felt provincial. I wasn�t part of the club of "real" college freshmen. That wasn�t how they meant it, of course, but their new experiences emphasized what I lacked.

After graduation from ACC I left town, too. In the next eight years I racked up more than eight different addresses, from Wisconsin to New Hampshire. There were new cityscapes to explore and backroads to discover, but each locale was just a stopping point along the journey. It was hard to tell where the final destination itself would be.

Through it all, Queensbury was ground zero, the ultimate gathering place for many of us wanderers. Despite protestations of wanting to see the world and leave home behind, we would return up the Northway, like salmon heading upstream, to that place on the map halfway between Montreal and New York City. We compared notes on where we�d been and where we were going, then quickly scattered again.

A number of my friends never really lived outside the area. Some went to college and returned quickly. More and more of us are trickling back each year, as we realize that no place is perfect, and most places are less perfect than here.

Many local graduates who move away say they would love to come back, if only they could find jobs. A lot of people leave here never intending to return, no what economic boom may be just around the corner. Yet how many of those people will end up in small cities and large towns where the first thing graduating seniors do is leave and vow to never look back?

The unpredictable winds of life blow some people around the country, or even across the globe, while others land and take root in more familiar soil. The farther you go from your hometown and the longer stay away, the dimmer your memory gets about why you left in the first place.

Last year I accompanied my parents on a "nostalgia tour" of their hometowns in Nevada. I saw the halls of Reno High School with my mom and her brother and sister. We took pictures outside their family home, still intact, complete with the old tetherball in the backyard. In Carson City, we found Dad�s old homestead, now a hair salon. The built-in corner cupboard his dad made in the dining room was still there and in use, holding shampoo and towels.

My parents chose to leave Nevada and settle in Queensbury when I was five. The move was really a homecoming of sorts for my mother, who was raised in this area until age eight. We returned to be with family here. I have few memories of Nevada but when I do go there I do so as a visitor, not a native. Even though I�d love to see family members from there more often, I am a stranger to that setting and climate. I may have been born in the west, but I was raised a northerner.

Robert Frost said that home is where they have to take you in. I wonder if he knew that hometown friends are the ones who accept you in spite of the new wrinkles on your face or the same old flaws of your character. No matter how we change physically, there are so many ways we stay the same on the inside. Spending time with old friends introduces who you are now to the person you were then.

I love living in my hometown. Maybe it�s not for everyone, but even the most mobile member of our society needs a home to go home to, even if it�s only to stroll down Memory Lane.