Yeah, I don't get this feather thing.
Fredwina, I agree, your circumstances for moving were much harder than mine, but I must say the inclusion of 20 years in between leaving and returning, and the fact that I moved back to a different area in MA, not the city I grew up in, made it feel like I was living someplace slightly familiar, but not the same. It was compounded by the fact that we just could not afford to live in the place I grew up in, which we might have done, even though it was not close to where DH was working. We ended up living in a very small and rural town on the NH border where, ah, let's just say I was in the minority in a lot of ways. For 6 years, I pretended I didn't really live there, by participating in activities in other parts of my life. We finally moved to where we originally wanted to live, when our kids were in middle school and stayed there until we impulsively bought the house we are in now.