It's the strangest thing.

 

I've already mentioned that I'd never harboured a burning desire to return to T.I., although as the years have passed, my curiosity about the place where I had learned to read and write andyy where my grandfather was laid to rest was becoming less dormant.

Here I was, with just half a day up my sleeve, trying to re-live as much as I could, of a time when even little kids were pretty much free-range, and a place which apart from snakes, crocodiles, sharks, and open vents to underground tunnels, offered few dangers.  

Curiously from the moment I set foot ashore it was as though I'd never left.  We walked straight to the little lane that Lily's great grandfather had hewn from the side of the hill to give her grandfather and his siblings a safe shortcut down to town and school.  

We found our house too.  That wasn't difficult, as it was exactly where we left it, although there's a car there now and a solar hot water unit, but the tank stand I jumped off the time my parachute failed to open was still there, as rigid as the emotional scars which have stayed ever since.

As we explored all those familiar places, the others were clearly getting as big a kick out of my memories as I was out of remembering them, but I still couldn't get a handle on why I actually felt the way I did, or even what that feeling was.

I had given it no thought until now; for my parents leaving here was "going home", to a place I had never known, in those formative years perhaps that same journey for me was "leaving home".  

Since that time I have attended five schools, lived in more than a dozen suburbs in eight towns and a couple of States, and have never felt a connection with any of those places.  Perhaps it's just until now that I haven't thought about it.

For me, "home" will always be somewhere in a warm climate near a bright blue sea filled with deadly things intent on taking one to a better place and where the sun's cancerous gifts are brought through a sodden atmosphere filled with tropical fungus.  

I can't help it, What’s not to love about this place?