Poppy is running away from whatever it is, the fear of being ordinary, the fear of a predictable life in her small town of Linfield Ohio because in her words, once a small town defines you that is it, that is all of it.
Alex is a guy who seeks home, seeks grounding, seeks the comfort of it because of a loss in his life that threw things off kilter for him, so he never wants to be off ground.
These two could not be more different if they tried and yet they make sense together. The universe always intervenes and the timing is never quite right; so for a time, they float even with the underpinnings of love around them.
Love has never been their problem; everything else has.
…
I’ve not read the book yet, but I have watched the movie on Netflix, I am also a fan of Emily Henry because not only is she a fantastic writer, she is also a good egg. Her writing flows off the page like warm toast on a Sunday morning, a glass of champagne with friends on a Friday evening in one of our homes. Home hangs with best pals… that sort of thing. Without having read the book I quite like the movie a lot. I don’t know if it’s a true adaptation to the book, it probably isn’t and the book would be ten times better, but this is a lovely movie because it speaks to the souls of us as humans, and wanderers, our endless curiosities with the world and a quest for exploration of ourselves as we traverse the world. This innate desire to see the world, and fashion this new life away from our lives but in doing so we leave parts of ourselves, the core parts behind.
There is a bit of Poppy in all creatives and wanderers; I have always wanted to see the world, and muchness is in my vocabulary, much as it is in hers; it is almost a cornerstone of who we are as humans of a particular personality type; creatives, dreamers, etc. There is a voracity in our quest for wanting to see and do and feel many things all at once and yet we are tethered to a feeling of sameness that calms us. Home. And this is Poppy in the end, she goes back home, yes physically, but also home to herself and her heart, after much of her life spent running away from the smallness of the familiar she follows on the trail of the one thing that can lead her home; love. Embracing it in all its facets because where does the woman who has been everywhere in the world go? Home of course. She goes home because home is where we love, our feet always leave, but never our hearts. That is my favourite paraphrased quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes because it taps into the core of who we are, home is where the familiar is; people who know you and install the buttons they can push to get to you, where love lies low and sometimes yells really loud. Home is your place and your people, your soft space to land, but more importantly, home is with the ones you love. They see you in all your muchness and messiness, they are of you, you shared the same universe with them before even seeing the one outside of your four walls.
I love to travel but home, there is nowhere quite like it, it is where our comforts lie and you know, there are times when the comfort of home is all you need.