When I tell people I’m from New York, everyone thinks of the city.

I’m not from the city. I’ve never been.

I’m from a small town in the middle of a cornfield that’s a little bit south of a different city that sits on the edge of a relatively large lake, and that lake is the only thing, geographically speaking, that is between us and Canada. Personally, I’ve always liked the smaller lakes, the ones that are named for the way that they look like the fingers of a hand.

I keep trying to explain this place to people I meet on the road. It’s hard to put home into words.

I have very deep roots, there. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d hardly ever visited anywhere else in my life – a few places, here and there, but rarely.

My mother remembers that I fully intended to never leave home, to stay in my childhood house and take care of my parents until – well, forever. It’s an old, rambling country farm house on the top of the hill, surrounded by miles of corn fields and soy beans and purple clover.

I love that house. It is perpetually cluttered – entire rooms and drawers and cupboards are filled with stuff that only ever sits there accumulating dust. The living room has south-facing windows to let the light in, and a threadbare couch, and a big black dog. The kitchen smells like coffee in the mornings, and sounds like National Public Radio.

Since my little sister and I have been old enough to have separate rooms, I’ve slept in the attic, with a cat who hates everyone but me. The stairs from the upstairs to the downstairs are painted pink. The kitchen floor has a peeling, checkered pattern of squares that I can almost see if I can close my eyes.

Outside, there are overgrown gardens and fruit trees and pines and a wooden swing and a treehouse and a trampoline, and an Austrian pine tree several stories taller than the house and so big around that my little sister and I together still can’t get our arms around it. In the winter there used to be these drifts of snow as tall as me, and we would dig tunnels through them – my little sister and I, and then go inside for the hot chocolate that we used to make on the stove.

I never wanted to grow up, back then. I never wanted to leave…

There’s a bittersweet saying that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

But it isn’t gone. It’s still there. I dream about it all the time. I have been afraid of leaving all my life, and now I am thousands of miles away, and it’s still a part of me.

It will always be a part of me.

And it’s strange, but now that I have left, I am full of a feeling of not being ready to go home yet. I keep having dreams where I wake up at home before I meant to come back, and I miss Europe, I didn’t get to say goodbye to Europe, to this backpacking lifestyle I’ve found, and I want to go back…

And so I’m beginning to think that this will always be a part of me, too.