A Letter on the Road Home
My Dearest Friend,
There are roads I could drive with my eyes closed—not because they are simple, but because they have lived inside me for so long that I no longer need to think about them. They exist somewhere deeper than memory, somewhere instinctive… somewhere that does not require explanation.
They are the roads that lead to my grandparents’ house and childhood summers, the roads that curve past familiar farms and fields—the roads where directions are given in stories instead of addresses. Turn at the old gas station…Go past the place we still call by the old family’s name…Follow the gravel road until the tires change their song… and somewhere in the middle of it all, without needing to look at a map or listen for the next instruction, I know exactly where I am.
We spend so much of our lives learning roads that do not know us yet. We arrive somewhere new and careful, measuring distance in minutes, watching for signs, listening for directions. We learn where to turn, where to stop, where to go for groceries or coffee or the small, ordinary pieces of life that slowly make a place feel like ours. And then, just when we finally know them, it is time to leave again.
That is the rhythm of this life: new roads, new places, new beginnings, over and over again, until the unfamiliar becomes familiar and then, just as quickly, becomes something we carry away with us.
And then, every so often, there are these roads—the ones that do not ask to be learned again, the ones that do not need a GPS, the ones that have held you before you ever thought to question whether you belonged there.
This summer, we are driving those roads again, not because we are lost and not because we are searching, but because we are in between. Between one chapter and the next. Between one home and another. Between the life we have just packed into boxes and the life we have not yet begun to build.
Everything we own is either in a car with us or crossing an ocean without us, and so we take the long road—not because we have to, but because we can. We choose the miles. We choose the time it takes… the conversations that only happen when there is nowhere else to be, the quiet that settles in when the world narrows to the road ahead and the people beside us.
There is something steady in that, something grounding. Not because the destination is waiting, but because the road itself already knows how to carry us.
These are the roads that have taken me home for every kind of moment life has asked me to walk through: for grief that needed space to land, for joy that needed to be shared, for babies introduced to family arms, for goodbyes that linger longer than we want them to, for seasons where life felt too heavy to hold alone, and for seasons where life was so full it needed somewhere to go.
The reasons have changed, but the roads have not. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of them as just a way to get somewhere—because the truth is, the road has always been part of it. The road is where we talk. The road is where we remember. The road is where we take a breath before stepping into whatever comes next… where we return to ourselves in the quiet recognition that we have been here before, that we have traveled hard roads and easy ones, that we have found our way even when we didn’t know where we were going, and that we can do it again.
And maybe that is why the words always catch in my throat: "country roads, take me home...to the place I belong." Not because there is only one place, but because there are many, and there have been many roads that led me there, some chosen, some unexpected, some beautiful, some difficult. All of them part of the story. All of them part of me.
The Lesson
The roads that take us home matter just as much as the destination. Not just the physical ones we travel mile after mile, but the paths that shape us along the way: the seasons that send us back, the moments that redirect us, the turns we never planned to take.
We often focus on where we are going, but it is the road that teaches us how to get there. It gives us space to process, to connect, to remember who we are in the middle of constant change. And sometimes, before stepping into something new, what we need most is not arrival, but the journey itself.
To the Spouse on the Road Home
If you find yourself somewhere between where you have been and where you are going, I hope you give yourself permission to stay there for a moment. Let the miles stretch out in front of you without rushing them. Sit in the conversations, the quiet, the in-between that so rarely gets space in this life.
There is nothing wasted about the road—not the long drives, not the familiar turns, not the moments where something in you settles simply because you recognize where you are. Even in a life built on movement, there are still places and paths that know you… that hold your story, that remind you that you have been carried through every season before this one.
So wherever your road is taking you next, I hope you let yourself feel it. Not just the destination, but the journey that is getting you there.
