Almost everyone says the same thing after a trip: it’s good to be home. I’m now on my flight back to San Francisco and started missing home about two days ago.

Most of us carry positive associations of home from our childhood. Home meant love, protection, warmth, safety; it meant – and means – a haven from all the bad things in the outside world. When we are feeling sad or afraid or threatened, we just want to go home.

When we travel, we are most vulnerable to the unknown and unexpected, which in part is what makes travel both alluring and unsettling. We are away from all that’s familiar. But isn’t that why we travel? Yes, but we all have our threshold for the strange and alien. As much as I hate to admit it, my threshold lowers as I get older.

Still, our attachment to home mystifies. I’ve only lived in my current apartment for a few months, and, yet, it has become my home in that short span supplanting the last to hold the honorific. And soon I will be unpacking and reintegrating myself into my place in the world with the same zeal that filled me at my departure two weeks ago. At least until my next trip, it will be good to be home.