How far do we have to travel before we realize what we were looking for was already home?
The gate still stuck.
He smiled when he discovered that.
Forty-three years had passed since he had last pushed it open, but apparently no one had ever bothered to fix the bottom hinge.
He lifted slightly as he pushed, just as his father had taught him when he was a boy.
Up, then over.
The gate scraped across the concrete and swung open.
Some things, apparently, remembered you too.
He stood there for a moment with one hand resting on the weathered wood.
The house beyond it wasn’t his anymore.
It hadn’t been for decades.
A young couple owned it now. They had bought it from the family who bought it from the family his parents had sold it to when they moved away.
He knew none of them.
But when he had knocked on the front door and explained that he grew up there, the woman who answered had smiled.
“Would you like to see the backyard?”
He almost said no.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he had stopped in the first place.
He had been driving home from a business trip when he saw the exit sign.
The town was only twenty minutes off the highway.
Twenty minutes became a left turn.
Then another.
And suddenly, he was driving streets he hadn’t seen since he was eighteen.
The drugstore was gone.
So was the gas station where he had bought his first tank of gas with money he earned himself.
The high school looked twice as big.
The Little League field looked half as small.
Nothing was quite the way he remembered it.
And yet, he hadn’t needed directions once.
Now he was standing at the garden gate.
“Go ahead,” the woman said. “Take your time.”
He thanked her and stepped through.
The yard was smaller too.
As a boy, he had been convinced it went on forever.
There had been enough room for baseball games, birthday parties, a swing set and the vegetable garden his father planted every spring.
The swing set was gone.
So was the old pecan tree.
But the garden was still there.
Not his father’s garden, of course.
These people had raised beds now, edged neatly with cedar. Tomatoes climbed wire cages. Rosemary spilled over one corner. A row of peppers stood beneath the afternoon sun.
He walked toward it.
Before he reached the first bed, he smelled the tomatoes.
Not the fruit.
The vines.
That sharp, green scent released when a leaf brushes against your hand.
He stopped.
For a moment, he wasn’t sixty-one years old.
He was eight.
Barefoot in the dirt.
His father was kneeling between the rows with a coffee can full of seeds beside him.
“Not too deep,” he was saying. “They’ve got to be able to find the light.”
He hadn’t remembered those words in more than fifty years.
Maybe he had never remembered them at all.
But there they were.
Not too deep.
They’ve got to be able to find the light.
He reached down and rubbed a tomato leaf gently between his fingers.
The scent grew stronger.
And with it came things he hadn’t known he still carried.
His mother’s voice through the kitchen window, telling them dinner was ready.
A sprinkler clicking across the lawn.
Grass stuck to wet feet.
The screen door slamming.
His father’s hands covered in dirt.
Summer evenings that seemed to last forever.
He had spent most of his adult life going somewhere.
College first.
Then a job in another city.
Promotions.
A bigger house.
Another promotion.
Another city.
He had worked hard, and life had been good to him.
He had seen places his father never saw.
Sat in rooms his younger self could never have imagined entering.
Built a life he was proud of.
For years, whenever someone asked where he was from, he gave them the name of this little town.
But he hadn’t thought of it as home in a very long time.
Home was wherever his wife was.
Where his children had grown up.
Where his mail arrived and his car sat in the garage.
That was home.
Wasn’t it?
He looked around the backyard.
Nothing there belonged to him.
Not the house.
Not the garden.
Not even the gate.
And yet, standing there, he felt something he hadn’t expected.
Not a desire to move back.
Not sadness exactly.
Something quieter.
Recognition.
He had spent decades believing that leaving home was part of becoming someone.
Maybe it was.
But no one had told him that leaving a place and losing it were not the same thing.
Some places don’t stay behind when we leave them.
They come with us.
In the way we plant tomatoes.
The way we lift a gate before pushing it open.
The way a particular scent can collapse fifty years into a single afternoon.
The way words spoken casually by a father can wait half a century to be heard again.
“Not too deep”, he whispered.
He smiled.
“They’ve got to be able to find the light.”
The woman stepped onto the back porch.
“I hope this isn’t strange”, she said.
“No”, he said, looking around once more. “Not strange at all.”
He thanked her and walked back toward the gate.
When he reached it, he lifted slightly.
Up, then over.
The old hinge cleared the concrete.
He stepped through and pulled the gate closed behind him.
For most of his life, he had thought home was a place you could leave.
Standing on the other side of that gate, he understood something different.
Maybe home isn’t always where we return.
Maybe sometimes it is what we discover never stopped traveling with us.
Remember.
About REMEMBER
REMEMBER is an ongoing collection of modern parables exploring identity, memory, grace and the quiet journey back to ourselves.
Each story stands on its own while gradually becoming part of a larger collection that will one day be published as a single volume.
Until then, welcome to The REMEMBER Library.
With respect,
Wayne (Adam) Greer
Part of Remember — stories about uncovering what was never really lost.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
About the Author
Wayne Adam Greer writes stories for people who have spent too much of life trying to become enough.
Through fiction, reflections, and practical frameworks, he explores identity, grace and the quiet process of uncovering what was never really lost.
His work is an invitation to slow down, look again and remember.
🌐 WayneAdamGreer.com
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