We knew we were home the moment we saw this town.

It was a long journey that brought us here to Harvard after nearly a decade of living in Jerusalem and London. For all of those years, I worked as a journalist covering the Middle East and the conflicts in Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the violence that seems to never stop unfolding in the post–September 11 world.

The Sennotts' home at 53 Bolton Road. (Courtesy photo)

When we pulled into the town, my wife, Julie, and I both knew immediately we would live here. When we saw the house at 53 Bolton Road, we knew this was where we wanted to be. We didn’t know right away that it was a newspaper house, but when we walked down into the basement and saw the old Harvard Post’s layout tables and its reporters cradling phones, it seemed almost too fitting for us.

I have worked at The Boston Globe for the last 14 years and been a reporter for longer than I would want to admit. I have lived and breathed newspapers since I was 21. And I am proud to serve as an adviser and guest columnist to this newest printed edition for the community, The Harvard Press.

The old Post house was big and rambling and needed a lot of work. It seemed like a good place to raise our four boys, Will, 9, Ry, 8, Gabriel, 6, and Jack, 4. We could feel that it held a lot of town history as the community paper; as the home of a Post founding publisher, Kathleen Cushman, and her daughters; as a nursing home; and as a place where a number of weddings were held when Kathleen was a justice of the peace. We could feel the presence of all these souls whispering in the creaking sounds of the old front porch.

We saw fitting humor in the fact that we made the offer to buy on Valentine’s Day and that the closing fell on April Fools.

There was destiny in all this. But I’m still left wondering if it’s the Jimmy Stewart kind of destiny in It’s A Wonderful Life or if it’s not more akin to the sealed fate of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

The other day when I was hacking away at the thicket of thorns in the front hedge of the old Post house, there were shades of The Shining. But later the same day I took the boys to the Hazel farm and cut down a beautiful Christmas tree as the sun set in shades of red behind the hills and we brought the tree home at dusk and I could feel the presence of the angel Clarence right there over my shoulder.

I felt lucky to be here. For us, this year is about coming home from “The Long War,” as they call it in Washington. And I feel as if I must have had an angel over my shoulder to have made it through so many years of combat reporting. It is good to be home.

But the truth of “The Long War” is we are never home.

I was reminded of this the first morning I had a cup of coffee on the front porch. I had just returned from spending the better part of the summer in Afghanistan and was a bit, well, jumpy when I first heard the crackle of distant machine-gun fire and the distinctive thumping of helicopter rotors as it dropped troops at a landing zone. The sound was echoing up over the hills from a Fort Devens military exercise.

I came here to the countryside to get far away from those sounds of war and ended up hearing them echo right across my door step. But it seems fitting that we should all be reminded of the war, even here amid the apple orchards and the horse farms and the rich New England history of this town.

It seems fitting to be reminded that the Army National Guard and Marines are there at Devens training most weekends to go back into The Long War. For some, the training is for their second and third tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now I welcome the sound of them training as a reminder that it is all still going on. We shouldn’t forget, not for a minute, of the sacrifices that are being made by soldiers and their families every day. Especially at this time of year.

I was reminded that you never come home from The Long War when I was unpacking the cardboard boxes from our transcontinental move and came across all the memorabilia of a war correspondent—the Kevlar vests and helmets and the photographs of colleagues who were killed or wounded working as journalists.

I was reminded that you never come home from The Long War when I came across a box that held a neatly folded, crisp, polyester American flag that an old friend of mine I grew up with in Sherborn, Mass., gave me when we left for Jerusalem in 1997. He gave it to me as a kind of jibe at a reporter at what he thought was a too-liberal Boston Globe and said with an edge of sarcasm, “Don’t forget where you come from, pal.”

I was reminded that you never come home from The Long War when I thought about how my relationship to our flag has changed, unfurled in a more complex understanding. For me, it is a cloth woven of both pride and longing.

The neatly folded stars and stripes in the cardboard box got me reflecting on the eagerness with which so many of us put flag decals on the bumpers of our gas-guzzling SUVs in the aftermath of September 11 while hardly seeing a hint of irony in that.

I thought about the flags that I saw draped on coffins being airlifted home. I thought about seeing the American flag after landing at Logan and being stunned at the gentle acceptance—even here with the cranky New Englanders—of a new life of searches and security checks.

I held the flag and stopped for a minute to think about how the country has changed in the ten years we have been away, how much we pulled together after September 11, but also how much we have succumbed to the fear of terror and how perilously close we are to allowing those who seek to terrorize to curtail the freedoms we love, to change our country.

But then I heard my four boys bounding down the rickety staircase with the broken banister that leads to my basement office. I left the flag in yet another unpacked box, happy to be home and wondering if I would ever get the time to fix that banister.

Charlie Sennott