Newton!

I'm back home in New England on vacation, staying in my childhood home, and I've got to say it's a wonderful feeling. While I love Los Angeles, I am truly a man of New England (ironic, given that my parents grew up in and around Los Angeles.)

My hometown, Newton, just west of Boston, is filled with trees. When living in an urban environment, like New York or Los Angeles, trees have their place - they are planted in specific locations along the road, or they are given a little more freedom in parks. In Newton, however, the trees seem to have free reign.

It is late summer now, with fall approaching. The air is humid, but thankfully the stickiest parts of the season that often come in late July and early August are receding. Instead, I can sit peacefully and enjoy the chorus of crickets and cicadas. This is quite a change from the truck that blares "La Cucaracha" over and over through my L.A. neighborhood.

This is a great time of year to be in New England. Sure, autumn is the most often romanticized season here, and I think that my neighborhood is at its most beautiful in the beginning of June. But it is still quite nice. The smells easily take me back to those long, lazy summer vacations of childhood.

Newton is divided into several "Villages," each of which has its own little town square. Despite being large enough to count as a true city, Newton maintains a small-town feel - the kind of thing Walt Disney was trying to re-create with Main Street U.S.A., only this is New England, so it's even older than that.

And yet, part of me says that in the long run, this is not where I am going to wind up. More and more friends of mine are moving away, as friends will do. I try to deny it, but one day my parents will move away, and this house will be someone else's, which is, in a way, disturbing. Yet things change. After all, I moved away five years ago, and while I spent my summers during college here, I haven't truly lived here year-round for about nine years. I love Newton, just as you might love a family member, but I also know that we may, in the end, remain separated by a continent.

The painful part of nostalgia is the melancholy that comes with it. Somewhere in our minds, we are certain that childhood will come again, and that the comfort we miss will be experienced in full once again. The melancholy comes from the rational, logical part of our minds that tells us: No. This was the past. There may be joys to be found in the future, but they will not be the same joys.