The Country That Becomes Home

Simon Winchester trades in his UK citizenship to become an American:

I began to consider what truly mattered to me, about the society in which I wanted to live out the rest of my days. I used to stroll at lunchtime down to the waterfront, at the Battery, and list those attributes of Home I felt I could abandon. Though at first I felt a traitor, a heretic, I realized I would feel no qualms at all about turning my back on the notions of royalty, on the bizarre idea of an established church, on inherited privilege, on the House of Lords, on class divisions, and on the relative want of opportunity. It was this last that pushed me over the edge. By now I was prospering, and in a way and to a degree that I felt I could never have done back home. I felt so deeply grateful to America in consequence, beholden.

I feel much the same way, but I am at a moment when I am about to go back to England for a period with my family and old friends and see the country that I grew up in as a more distant adult, since I was kept from visiting it by the HIV ban for a long time. Memories will doubtless flood back. But in some ways, it is all a prelude to arriving back in the States for the first time as a Green Card holder and being told, politely, "Welcome Home."