A friend of mine once described coming home as “touching base.”

I always took it to mean recharging. Resetting. Like unplugging the computer to get the thing to work the way you want.

I thought of this when writing about the amazing Amelia Oliver, a smart performer who’s gracing the Webster City Community Theatre stage in its most recent production, “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Like Amelia, I came home.

The first time I came home, I had just graduated from Iowa State with a journalism degree and spent the months following working for the Daily Freeman-Journal until my computer scientist husband got a job with IBM that landed us in Connecticut.

I got a job with a professional repertory theatre when I couldn’t find a journalism job. My office overlooked the auditorium and the stage. Because of that, the opening strains of the “Peter Pan” overture are now a part of my blood. A fonder memory is of a production of the “Mikado” that featured Godzilla. I heard the soprano soloist shoot an octave too high and miss during that show. I saw “Cats” on Broadway twice in those days. Took a limo with friends to Manhattan to see an Off-Broadway show on Halloween night. My husband was mistaken for Sean Lennon.

Gosh, I wanted so badly to be a part of all that.

When I landed my first journalism job there, it was a doozy. A company hired me to start a weekly newspaper in the town of 6,000 that had two zip codes; one was on “the hill” and the other in “the depot.” High and low. You get the picture.

A few years went by and I took over the firm’s flagship newspaper.

Then I burned out and went to England.

When I was deported from England, I came home.

It’s strange how time and the world and our aspirations sort of cook together into our own individual brew, isn’t it? I mean, if I hadn’t been booted from England I wouldn’t have been here when my mom had a heart attack and stroke.

On that trip home, I read MacKinlay Kantor’s “Andersonville” and was inspired to improve my writing. I played cards with my favorite aunt and cousins. Mom struggled to hold the cards at first, but I honestly think those rounds of Contract brought her strength back along with her spirit. She was not a happy loser. In those days, while I was home, I paged through the photo albums Mom kept and learned that time had passed while I was gone. I gave my attention, finally, to what had sustained her in that absence: birthdays, births, cocktails at the Country Club, her job at Iowa Miss & Mrs, winter trips to Texas, and multiple holidays.

It takes some kind of stoic numbness to tell yourself not being present for all that is okay.

But we go forward.

Charge ahead.

Yearn to succeed.

I know I did.

I went to graduate school and then came home. And I made a few other returns along the line.

Each time, I softened to the place. Saw it for the respite it was. Big city life and all that stress eventually couldn’t hold a candle to being here.

Then Mom needed me again. I can still feel the powerful goodness of being her companion in her last days.

That is when I came home for good.

Jane Curtis is editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal. She is an Iowa Newspaper Association Master Columnist.