I received a friendly jab from a correspondent yesterday who emailed me, “I've got to rib you a little.  In the last bit of your message you spoke of summer in the past tense. Aaaaerrrhgg!  Do we have to go there so soon?” What can I say, except, “Guilty”? I guess that the fact that this is the last week before school starts and we are deeply into planning for fall programs at the church has made me aware that autumn is coming. One of the things about our new home up north is that the length of the days and nights changes dramatically. Sunset is now nearly an hour and a half later than it was at the solstice. I really notice the darkening skies in the evenings. Although we’re still about six weeks away from having lived in this house for a year, it is starting to feel a bit like the weather was when we first looked at this house.

It has been so long since we first moved to Rapid City that I don’t remember all of the emotions surrounding that move, but moving twice in two years reminds me a bit of our student days. After a year of living in Mount Vernon, we moved to this house and now have been here for nearly a year. I don’t use the GPS when I’m driving around like I did when we first got here. I don’t stop to think, “Which grocery store should I go to?” I’ve established care with a new doctor and I know the names of some of our neighbors. I even know the names of one of our neighbor’s cats. Part of me is starting to feel at home in this place.

However, I had an experience yesterday that caught my interest. After supper, we walked down to the beach from our home and walked along the beach a bit as the sun was getting low in the sky. You could tell that it is summer (and not autumn) because there are lots of boats tied to the moorings in the bay. The boats are small recreational boats, mostly with outboard motors. As the sun sank towards the horizon, the sea looked silver under a nearly cloudless sky and the boats became silhouettes in my vision. I had a déjà vu experience. Suddenly, I remember walking along the Brittany Coast more than 40 years ago. We looked out onto the ocean, across the moored boats toward England. Our friends, who were showing us the place they call home, took us to see the coast. We noticed the small fishing boats and enjoyed the sea air. After we walked on the beach for a while we went to a fish dealer where we bought what seemed like an enormous amount of seafood. Then they took us home and proceeded to cook and serve one of the most magnificent feasts I’ve ever enjoyed. Each course seemed like an entire meal and we kept expecting it to be the main course, but more dishes kept coming. It was a wonderful and very memorable experience.

A lot of things have happened since then. We were newlyweds at the time, now our children are asking us about our plans for our 50th wedding anniversary next year. We didn’t have children in those days. We had just received the call to our first parish as ministers, but that trip was before we were ordained and before we began serving as ministers. Our lives have been full and good and there have been a lot of sunsets and a lot of trips and a lot of friends with whom to share wonderful meals.

Somehow, however, walking along the beach last night transported me in my mind to a far away place in a long ago time. I felt a bit like a tourist in my own home place. I don’t remember this feeling when we first moved to South Dakota, although it seems like I might have because Rapid City was a place we had vacationed several times before we moved there.

Although there is some evidence linking certain types of migraine headaches and other medical conditions with déjà vu, there is no evidence that it is an indication of any illness or disease. It simply occurs from time to time in healthy persons. It may be that it comes from particular combinations of neurons firing and certain synapses functioning, but it is not truly a dissociative condition. The person experiencing déjà vu is fully aware of their present location and condition.

Also the experience was, for me, a pleasant one. I commented on it to my wife and she had had a similar memory stirred in her. We agreed that it was a very pleasant memory. It may well be that it has less to do with having moved to a new place and more to do with the natural process of integration that is the major psycho-developmental tasks of people in their aging years. Sorting through memories and making sense of our lives is something that we have been doing right alongside sorting through our possessions and scaling down the number of things we keep.

Part of my sense of disorientation in this particular home has to do with having the mountains to the east of our home. We have lived most of our lives with the mountains to the west. And although we have never before lived near the ocean, we did live on the west side of Lake Michigan for four years of graduate school. From that perspective not only are the mountains on the wrong side of us, so too is the large body of water. We marvel at sunrises over the mountains and sunsets over the water in this place, whereas more often we have been looking at mountain sunsets and sunrises over the lake. We have, however, lived in this house for nearly a year. I’m not confused about which direction is north, south, east or west any more. I can walk or drive from our house without getting lost.

For now feeling a bit like a tourist in my own home isn’t a bad sensation. Our lives have brought us to a good and beautiful place and we will continue to settle. Maybe our walks will continue to explore new territory and lead us down memory lane at the same time for years to come.