Welcome Map

Our family has always been moving—not necessarily as in changing homes, but moving as in constantly in motion. Each of the places we lived in was little more than a base camp we would return in between trips. This is mostly my mother’s influence—her previously occupation as a flight attendant had made her aware of her instinctive love for finding herself in new places, a trait that I inherited.

Our base camp is filled with evidence of this shared love, but it is most present on our door because the inside of our door is covered from head to toe with magnets we’ve acquired from various places and times. Welcome to our home—be careful not to slam the door! Yes, we know that the steel door is heavy. It’s made heavier by the weight of the pieces of us it carries.

The Yosemite magnet in the top left corner reminds me of the comic resourcefulness our family mustered when our car ran out of gas in the middle of the mountain road at 4 a.m. I remember being scared witless of the pure darkness, surrounded by nothing but nature sounds. The Cancun magnet? The best things in the world don’t come from books, even if they are highly recommended travel guides that speak well of a certain 5-star hotel. Even though our hotel was right on the beach, it’s the view from the top of the Chichen Itza that will be forever imprinted in my memory.

I haven’t yet picked out an Ann Arbor magnet that will one day take its place on our family’s eccentric version of the world map. I’m still working on building the meaning it will carry, shaping the parts of myself it will come to represent. Meanwhile, I’m building my own welcome map on my dorm door, filling it with pieces of my college life. My college map is a little different from our family map back at home in that it has much more than just places—it has people, events, changes…and the random things that just sort of stuck. Each day as I walk out and in this door, I think about all the experiences I’ve already collected, and take in all the empty space yet to be filled. My doors are visual representations of all the things I am made of. As I journey in and out of our door each day, it gives me the courage to keep exploring, to keep adding new magnets on the door that leads to the place I call my home.