Have you ever been back to a place you knew a long time ago? I am travelling this week and am in Northern Virginia. I went to high school here, learned to drive here, generally spent the better part of my teenage years here - with favorite hangouts, cool places to drive and play and all the sorts of things you do as a teenager. After college, I moved back here slightly farther out - it required a long drive through the countryside and farms before hitting the small town I lived in. I moved away to go to graduate school nine years ago and havent been back in the area for almost 5 years when I sold my townhouse.

The place is booming. Lots of building, lots of new Barnes and Nobles and Starbucks and Staples. I spent part of the day driving around today and it was eerily weird. I felt like I knew where I was. Road names sounded familiar, the biggies I definitely knew and remembered how they hooked up. But I contantly felt like I didn't know where I was. As if I suffered from deja vu or amnesia but knew I was supposed to know. So many new roads, housing complexes and townhouse rows and stip malls dot the landscape and have replaced the sweeping vistas of the rolling hills that I used to know, I felt like I really was in some other town. It was strangely disconcerting and sad at the same time. I felt waves of nostalgia roll over me as I passed places where I grew up, where I learned about life and where I moved away from so many years ago. They say you can't go home again - and I guess if family is not there anymore and your friends have all grown up as well and made lives for themselves, you really can't.