Tuesday, July 22, 2025

There’s a kind of disorientation that happens when you return to a place you once knew by heart — and realize your internal map doesn’t work anymore.

I’m in my mother’s hometown this week. It’s the county seat where my maternal grandparents lived; my grandpa was the fire chief.  It’s where my siblings and cousins once spent Thanksgivings and summer stretches, where large family reunions were held at the fairgrounds, and where many of my core childhood memories seem to reside. It’s a place I still love, both for its own charm and for the people and traditions that once made it feel alive to me. And even though I haven’t visited much in recent years, there’s a muscle memory to being here. At least I thought there was.

Sunday evening, I set out to find a place we used to go several times every summer. A spot tucked along a rural road where my family had been carving initials into a limestone cliff for more than 50 years. The marks stretch across decades — childhood nicknames, wedding years, the first appearance of a baby’s initials. You can trace entire lifelines on that stone.

I thought I knew the way without even thinking. But I got completely turned around.

What used to be instinctive (a drive I could have done with my eyes closed) felt foreign. The road I was sure would get me there… didn’t. Nothing looked quite like I remembered it. When I finally found the right stretch, I couldn’t even access the cliff. A house stood there now. A full, established home that didn’t look particularly new. As if it had always been there. As if we’d never parked in that dusty pull-off or taken turns with a pocketknife to commemorate our visits in stone.

I understood the passage of time. I’ve seen the dates on those carvings. But something about being so lost in a place I once knew so well brought me up short.

I suppose that’s how it works. Change doesn’t always arrive with ceremony. Sometimes it shows up slowly — brick by brick, house by house — while you’re busy living elsewhere. And then one day, you return, expecting it all to look the same, to feel the same, and instead you’re a stranger in a place that hasn’t been waiting for you.

What caught me off guard wasn’t just the house or the wrong turns, it was the realization that I might never come back again. My mother is nearing the end of her life. This town — her hometown — may not be part of my future in any real way. That road, that limestone bluff, those carvings… they may stay lost to me now. Or maybe they’re not actually lost at all…maybe they’ve just been claimed by someone else’s story.

I think we all carry around maps — of places, of people, of who we were when we were there. And we expect, somehow, that the map will still match the territory. That we’ll return and find what we left.

But more often than not, time rewrites the landscape.

Sometimes literally.

Sometimes with a house.

Sometimes with the quiet realization that the road you once knew has simply led you somewhere else.  And that’s okay, too.

Until Next Time,

Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC