For several years the first week in September meant a long car ride south down the interstate in a van loaded with bedding, a laptop, a new suitcase, and a child who wouldn’t be returning until Thanksgiving. Across the median strip, other vans and cars with rooftop carriers would be streaming north, all part of a great seasonal migration between home and campus. At rest stops and fast-food joints, I’d recognize the parents of other college-bound teenagers by their relentless cheerfulness and grim air of preoccupation. They’d look at their wristwatches, check tie-downs, steal glances at the departing child. Behind the brave smiles, they shared a single worry: what if my son or daughter returns in a few months aloof and estranged to sit, as essayist Richard Rodriguez once put it, “like an anthropologist at the kitchen table.”

I never lose sleep over this question for two reasons. First, I teach at a university and understand that higher education is meant to make the familiar seem strange in the same way that travel does. The second reason is that there was always another child waiting at the kitchen table when we got home. This time is different because we’re dropping off our last child, and the house we’ll be returning top won’t be empty exactly but awfully, awfully quiet, and that will be strange indeed.

In previous Septembers, the road to college followed I-94 to Madison, the countryside whipping past at 70 miles per hour. This time we’re driving to UW-La Crosse on a two-lane through the Driftless Area, a slow road through hills and coulee towns with old red brick facades. When the kids were little, we made frequent forays from home on roads just like this one, meandering trips to cranberry marshes at harvest time or limestone caverns in summer dog days or tours of old lead mines or historic homes led by elderly docents who seemed to be recalling their own childhoods. There were visits to art museums and county fairs and pow-wows where the whole sky throbbed with drumbeats, excursions to dry-docked submarines and petting zoos and weird concrete sculptures made of seashells and tie-rods and old beer bottles. We considered all of these trips educational in the sense that they were intended to provoke a sense of wonder as well as belonging, as if to assure the children, “What an interesting place you live in!”

During his college career, my son will doubtless encounter some version of Professor Marvel – (“Professor Marvel never guesses! He knows!”) – the sort of academic so keen to defamiliarize students from their own experience that they end up believing the wide world begins in some distant city – New York or London or wherever Professor Marvel went to graduate school. It’s fine to want students to feel at home in the world, but first they have to feel at home.

I remember another, much shorter journey on my son’s first day of formal education. The three block walk from home to preschool seem to take all morning not because the boy was apprehensive, except about the looming prospect of naptime, but because he was so absorbed by everything we passed along the way. Every few steps he’d stoop to examine some new wonder – a fallen leaf, cracks in the sidewalk, a line of ants – as if everything was worthy of attention. I’m afraid I played the role of Professor Marvel that day, dragging the little fellow by the arm, hurrying him along so we’d arrive on time.  “We’re here,” I announced at the school door, leaving him to face the alphabet and naptime alone.

Now our positions are reversed. Fixed on the future, that cloudland of possibility, he’s eager to get to the dorm on time; I, on the other hand, wish our ride could go on forever. When we get there, things will be rushed and awkward and I’ll forget what I want to tell him, which is this: Trusts your instinct. What feels worthwhile and true now shouldn’t change overnight. And if home seems a little strange come Thanksgiving, it’s because you’ve never had to think of home as an idea before – as a choice – and now you do. But that’s OK. Take your time. We’re not going anywhere.

John Hildebrand, a professor emeritus at UW-Eau Claire, is the author of five books including, most recently, The Long Way Round: Through the Heartland by River. Read more of his work here.