A few months back, my family and I moved to Massachusetts; and we thought it was a permanent move. There was so much we loved there, and so many possibilities. We were as excited to go as we were frightened to leave.

A few months after that, we moved back. We were going to renew our life at home in the Midwest, celebrate our friendships, do more of the things we'd always neglected to do. And to some degree, we have done that. But our love for the coast never went away. And as the year slowly creaks toward spring, we long for what we once had there.

It's stupid and embarrassing in the extreme to wish you had a summer house when fifteen years ago, you thought you'd never own your own home, when you grew up in apartments, when even your parents didn't own a flat over the store until you were nearly grown up.

But it's three degrees F* here right now, in the sun. Half the new trees we planted are dead, and the sun is like a mockery. Out where we moved, it's about 40* F, and soon the crocuses will pop up, and the seals will have pups, and the whales will return. There are hard winters there once in a while, but not the kind of winters that sear the lungs or causes porches literally to fall off houses because of the effects of the cold. And right now, we wish, or sort of wish, that we hadn't been so hasty in turning tail and heading back for all that was familiar, because, after all, it's so ... familiar, and thus unremarkable, and what is comforting is not adventure.

We can visit the place we once had a home, and stay in someone else's for about $2,000 a week. But, we all agree, that would be like going to the wedding of your ex-spouse. And, it would be like going to the wedding of your ex-spouse six months after the person broke up with you.

Do you ever wish you were two people and could lead two lives? Do you wish you could leave a part of yourself in the place you undeniably call home, where those you love, live, too, but send your other self to dance on a beach in Mykonos, or a cliff above the Atlantic? Perhaps part of you could enjoy the wisdom and validation of being older, and the other the sheer animal joy and metabolic grace of youth? Stand with the one you'll love forever and dry the plates at the kitchen sink, and also send that other self to experience the sleepless obsession of new love, the utter disappearance of appetite at one voice on the message machine?

This kind of yearning has inspired so many stories of physical time travel that it is itself almost a cliche. But we only really ever will be possessed of one kind of time machine -- memory. And it comes with a bittersweet tariff.

But I think that the other kind, the real kind, would have that very same price tag.

Jackie Mitchard