Euxton.

      It will never be the same again.  I do not refer to the village itself, which I suspect will remain just as it is until the day that the sun envelops the earth, but to my relationship with it. It will never be the same again as it once was, when I was young and lived there and was part of it like a piece in a jigsaw; a vital part of the larger pattern.

      The village, like most English villages, nestles among towns and cities of much greater size and importance. It is a quiet little farming community in the north of England, just a forty-minute drive outside of the major urban center of Manchester, and only twenty minutes from the city of Preston. This is the village in which I grew up.

      I navigated my home with the surety of a local and the passion of a wild creature. My companions and I preceded the era in which parents seek to shield their children from the dangers of the world by only a few years, and we took full advantage. We almost lived in the woods, constructing dens out of trees and splashing in Culbeck, the trickle of a stream that local legend has it was named by King Charles II. Like everything else around us, it was small, unassuming, unimportant, but to the people who lived there, it was part of the fabric and history of our home.

      The trees were those staples of English woodland: oak and beech. A carpet of smooth acorns and the empty furred shells of beech nuts crunched underfoot. Unlike the dry stillness of a pine forest, this woodland Eden seemed perpetually damp. The scent in the air was of damp earth and wet trees, and even in fall there was no crackle of dead leaves under our feet. They were never dry enough.

      When I was eleven years old, I met Keith. He wasn't quite the boy next door--more accurately the boy from down the street. We spent much of our time together; the two of us along with my brother and a younger boy from a few doors down made an inseparable team. We rode bikes, played video games, and hung out together at the local skate park where I, lacking balance and grace, would cheer on the boys as they performed acrobatic moves. I was happy there. The shush-shush sound of wheels caressing smooth wooden half pipes was a soundtrack for the best of my childhood. We spent most of our time in Keith's garage; that temple to awkward adolescent romance, where I watched him build ramps out of scrap wood and fix his bike and where, as we grew up, I received my first kiss and my first broken heart.

      Oh yes, I was happy there, though my introverted bookworm nature was unique among my peers; few to choose from, in such a small village. I do not wish to disparage my friends. Those childhood acquaintances were wonderful people, some of whom I am still in contact with today, but I had little in common with them. I had no bonds so strong that I could not bear to leave. Even my voice was wrong. While everyone around me spoke with a thick Lancashire accent, my own vaguely BBC tones marked me out as different; an outsider from the inside. I was never quite able to determine why that was, but it seemed as though my identity, beginning with my voice, belonged to no place. I was unmolded clay, ready to be imprinted upon by whatever home I should choose. It was as though I was always fated to leave.

      Fate called the year I was seventeen. As usual, I was burying my head in some online community in order to escape from the drudgery of A-Level homework. That was how I met Ben. Six years older, the scientist--just starting his PhD, in fact--was friendly, from a distance, as part of our group of friends. I decided that this would not do, and relentlessly pursued him. As I fell deeper in love, I made the decision to give up my life in England and be with him.

      Over the years I have become Americanized, just like the shows they watched and the music they listened to in that village of mine. The clipped tones of my neutral English accent-- acceptable, even if the more local twists of tongue would have been preferred-- have been subsumed under a veneer of American twang. "You sound so American!" they squeal whenever I return, while here the reaction to my blended voice is slower; upon my speaking certain words the predictable response arrives: the inevitable tilting of head, narrowing of eyes and "where are you from?" They are cautious, in case they are mistaken. My strangerhood is more apparent in the place I called home for eighteen years than the place that I adopted only a handful of years ago.

      I visit once a year or so. It is unchanged. I am the one who has changed; I look at the place with different eyes. In adulthood, the woods that seemed so grand when I roamed them as a child now look small, though still beautiful. The farm fields and rolling hills of the Pennines are so green it takes my breath away. America has enough of its own beauty to last me a lifetime, but I have never seen anything so green here as the English countryside. It is peaceful, almost ethereal in the mornings, with heavy mist hanging over the ground and the promise of rain in the air. In England, there is always the promise of rain. Now, unlike before, that is good. Cool and refreshing, it keeps the green bright.

      As an adult, I see the history all around me. I can stand in one spot in the village, right outside my first school, and point to here, a Roman road; here, a weaver's cottage (you can tell by the pattern of the windows, they said); here, a broken set of stocks along the school drive.
As a visitor, I see beauty and worth in my old home that I did not see before. It is incredible. But I am only a visitor, no longer a part of it. I cut myself out of it as cleanly as if with a scalpel, and now the wound has healed over completely, and there is no place for me. My friends are living the very same lives they were before, or have had children and are living their parents' lives. My family has new routines and inside jokes. I ask my mother if we can have dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant; the one we often went to before I left. "We don't go to the Hyatt any more," she says. I left. I am not keeping up with these things. I am not a part of it.

      One anecdote reminds me of this fact with painful clarity. During one of my visits, I happened to walk down to the small corner shop next to the bakery and the ever-rotating series of takeaway restaurants. Perhaps a two-minute walk from my home, I have been popping in for little items since I was old enough to cross the main road by myself. When I placed my shopping down on the counter to pay and exchanged greetings with the older lady at the register, she gave me a warm look and asked "so, have you been to England before, then?"

      No, it will never be the same again.