Home again

I wonder what Dorothy felt like after “The Wizard of Oz” ended.

After she, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry had gotten over the shock of Dorothy’s delusional dream, what happened next? How long did it take for the there’s-no-place-like-home euphoria to fade away?

How many times did Dorothy have to get yelled at for forgetting to feed the chickens, or get scolded for not repairing that storm shelter before she thought to herself, “Man, Oz wasn’t really so bad after all?”

For those of us who hope to enter the job market sometime in the near future, odds are that after college we might end up back in Kansas – at least for a little while.
At the time of the 2000 census, almost 4 million people ages 25 to 34 reported that they were living with their parents.

And the economic downturn has made our prospects for true independence even worse. As of September, 202,000 young college graduates were searching for a job – nearly a 33 percent increase from the year before.

This high rate of unemployment probably explains why 60 percent of the college students who responded to a recent poll by job-search firm www.MonsterTRACK.com said they were planning on moving back home for some period of time after graduation, and 21 percent of those said they planned to stay at home for more than a year.  

After spending this past weekend at home, the prospect of making a more permanent move back doesn’t sound so appealing.

I went home last Friday for the first time this semester. By the time I pulled out of Bloomington, I was so starved for home cooking, my old bed and my family that the two and a half hours couldn’t go fast enough. 

But once I got there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.
Since I had been gone, my parents had remodeled our bathrooms and repaved the sidewalk in front of our house.

The bathroom where I had gotten ready for prom and every dance from sixth grade on had been replaced, and the tree I used to climb and sit in had been cut down to make way for the sidewalk.

For the first time, I was home, but it wasn’t the home that I remembered. It was different, changed – like I had found something familiar, but it was inside out.

I guess this happens to everyone at some point or another. There is a moment when the location of your capital “H” Home switches from your parents’ house to someplace else – for me, it must have happened sometime this semester.

Unfortunately, it looks like just as many of us are beginning to feel comfortable away from the nest, economic forces might start propelling us back there.

Perhaps it will just take a little bit of positive thinking to make us all more comfortable in the land of Mom and Dad.

Take a cue from Dorothy and repeat after me: There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.