That’s When I know I Am Home

When I was younger, I don’t think I could have imagined myself saying, “I don’t want to travel again for a very long time.” The story I told myself then was that I wanted to travel forever.

And I have been traveling, one city after another, to teach master classes, though a few years back I decided to return to calling them dance workshops. Something about the word master has always embarrassed me.

But no matter what our class is called, as soon as the music begins, a certain feeling comes over me: that I was always meant to do this. Add this to getting to visit towns and cities I might not get to see otherwise and it says everything about what I enjoy most about my work.

But even when I’m enjoying myself, there’s a lot of comparing that goes on. I don’t mean I compare my class to anyone else’s. I’m talking about comparisons of a different nature.

In fact, comparing is pretty much all I do for the first day or so, especially when I take a walk through a new neighborhood and compare someone else’s life to the one I left behind with its doors and windows locked. I look around and I am charmed as much by the farm houses outside of Wenatchee as I am by the beach bungalows in Papeete.

And this is good. It’s all part of the traveling cycle, the complex set of questions that crop up in unknown terrain. Our inner appraisal of choices made and ones still yet to make. I can even drive myself a little crazy with all the comparing that goes on as I imagine myself living one life after another after another.

Not to worry. As the days pass, I realize there are amazing houses and terrible restaurants wherever you go.

And it all happens so fast (in hindsight) and then the tedious airport again, the tedious ferry wait again, before I pull my suitcase up the walkway that leads to my building where, now wait just a minute, doesn’t my home look fantastic?

I unlock my door, step in, and the life, the one I’ve worked so hard for, rights itself. I warm to my things. We grow cozy together. Their familiarity connects me. To me. And that’s when I know I am home. That’s when I know.

At some point, the refrigerator door will close behind me, and there it is, the sound I know so well, the sound only my refrigerator makes. I open the door and let it close again, wahoosh, just to hear it again. And I doubt, I seriously doubt, that I can pull off traveling again next month.

I wrote this back in July.

By mid-August, my travel bag was packed. I admit I was a little restless: restless to teach, restless to return to that part of myself. So. Off I went.

Only to Whidbey Island. Not far, but new to me. And the students were great, the students are always great. I treasure every class in hopes of inspiring them to find a way to dance forever. “Just look at me,” I say. I try to confirm how dance is a huge part of who we are by choosing both my words and choreography carefully. I told students in Oak Harbor how the night before I dreamt—it wasn’t a dream really, more of a must-say nudging my half-sleep—how it’s always been them I was meant to nurture. That’s why I love to teach them, and why I love to dance with them. In Langley, I shared how eager they are, how alive, is dance’s greatest gift to me. Even if that sounds too schmaltzy or whatever.  

Even so, it isn’t travel I need now, but my own bed, and I don’t want to travel again (I swear) for a very long time.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest title, An Island Called Bainbridge: People, Places, 

Conversations is to be released in the fall of 2026. Save the Date: She is celebrating this new title with a launch party at Eagle Harbor Book Company on October 8, 6:30 p.m.; at Elliott Bay Book Company on October 13, 7 p.m.; Third Place Books/Ravenna on October 29, 7 p.m.; and signing copies at Magnolia’s Bookstore on October 3, 11 am to 2 pm.  For more information visit www.marylousanelli.com.