Musings On Home

In Ursula Le Guin’s excellent “The Dispossessed”, she writes that “you can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place you have never been”. Home changes when you leave, and you change whenever you’re away from it. Every place I’ve been has seeped into my bones, changed how I feel when I leave, and changed how I feel when I get back. 

Ursula writes that “no journey is complete without return.” You can never know the true impact of a place, a journey, a person, an experience, until you go back home. Sometimes you don’t know until years after, like how I’m feeling about Chile these days, realizing there so many of the memories I’d almost forgotten, the feeling of sleeping in a tent far away, feeling just a little “off” each day despite the adventures, the joy, the new sights, until they’ve come slamming back to me this last month.

It’s funny, how vaguely discontent travel can make one feel, always feeling a little shaky and uneven. It’s funny how much of the time on these grand adventures I’ve lived through I’ve spent just a little off, wrong, sad, tired, upset for some reason or another, mostly just for the different-ness of it all. And it’s funny to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that that isn’t what I’ll remember, how much my legs ache from sitting or the minor league headache that accompanies most days. I’ll remember the highs and the lows, and the squishy middle will fade into the background until I forget. Or at least I’ll think I forget, until I leave home again, and remember the ever-present vague discomfort of being away. 

On the phone with Dad the other day, pacing back and forth, tracing Chaco footprints through the dust, followed by my favorite of the stray dogs, he complimented my ability to see the good and the bad in all this. To be grateful for the experiences I’m having but also be grateful that they have an end date. That no matter where I go, I’m thinking of home. 

On the bus with Txuxa, driving from Kili to Meru, talking about home. We agree–it’s hard to be there, knowing we have to leave, even though it’s our favorite place. We can’t wait to be ready to be home, forever. I put my head on her shoulder, feeling so connected and similar to this person I’d practically just met. Agreeing that when we’re away, we want nothing more than to be home, but when we’re there, we can’t help but feel malcontent and snappy with the people we love. That it’ll feel so good to settle. Just not yet.

Emailing with Lara in China, saying that somehow being this far away is easier than being just a short drive from home, that somehow we feel more homesick when we can practically reach out and touch where it is we want to be but, in this moment of our lives, we always have to leave. How, here, I know it’s temporary, and somehow that makes it easier, less tantalizing to leave. Less resentment for the people who get to stay. Less wishing my life was different, and based there, not here. 

Maybe it’s all because it’s easier for me to anticipate something than to live in the moment. When I’m away, I can’t wait for that feeling of stepping through the door, dropping my bags, lying on the couch. And when I’m there, I can’t help but thinking that I have to leave, that during the day I can’t seem to truly get into a routine because I’m always going somewhere. I can’t wait to be done moving, to sit on that home-feeling couch forever, but I know I’m not ready yet.

Because despite all this, I can still settle somewhere far, far from home. I love to live out of my backpack, touch all the things I have in an armful, make my own peace through good books and good nights of sleep and new favorite warm drinks. I love the people I’ve gotten to meet, who I never would have otherwise, who are irreversibly woven into the tapestry that is the period of my life. 

So many things have been unimaginable to me on this journey. That I would ever be comfortable in this country, or in this house. That I would cope, just fine, with the experience of being woken in the night to the sound of something breaking in, that I would poop into a hole in the floor for three weeks, that I’d go without running water for a third of that time. 

That I would grow to so love and admire my Tanzanian mama, her constant lilting singing, her endless generosity, her delicious and effortless meals, her laughter filling the kitchen. In so many ways, being in this house doesn’t feel so different from being home. 

My mama here reminds me a lot of my real Mama, in ways I couldn’t have expected, across an ocean and so many cultural barriers and boundaries. Both love to cook, and laugh, and sing. Both communicate their love through food. Both accept no nonsense. Both are generous with their time, their house, their energy. They both eat last, they both raise chickens, they both make endless fun of their pets. They both make me feel safe, and calm, in a way I simply couldn’t have anticipated.

My time in this house has been relatively quiet, often three adults living parallel lives, and I couldn’t be more grateful to my Tanzanian parents for that. For opening their home to me and giving me my own space within it. For teaching me things I could never have learned otherwise, but not forcing me to grow beyond what I could handle. 

My time in Ngaramtoni, the village where we are living, has felt the closest to having a home here as we’ll come during our time in this country. Our choma, or barbeque, last week, in which people drifted in and out, friends and family mixing in the wafting scent of charred goat, felt like Maine. It reminded me of sitting by Tiger’s firepit in the lupine field in Newcastle, the whisper of the river behind us, family and friends enjoying the simple pleasures of a good meal eaten outdoors.

I have made village friends who we see each day on our daily commute, and learned how to interact in these settings, and found spaces that feel comfortable and safe. The hole-in-the-wall bar by our houses, which always smells strongly of lively men and sticky-sweet spilled beer, isn’t a space I ever could have imagined sitting in, watching local soccer alongside my new friends. The woman who greets us when we get out of the car, the bank of motorcyclists who nod and wave and sometimes offer us a ride. So many vignettes of these three weeks will stick with me long after my last walk back through the village, my last bucket shower, my last dinner with Mama and Baba. I am exceptionally grateful to have had this second home, this second family, this second neighborhood, to have this constant reminder that I can make home wherever I go.

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And still, when I think of home, which is often, I think of the blessing of getting to be present in joy.

How blessed I am, to have known how happy I was while I was in it, to have so much of my life tinged by the feeling of touching love, touching joy and knowing it, and feeling the sadness that it will be over soon, or at least different, the trees never quite blowing this way again, the people never quite the same amount of un-wrinkled and untethered, the sun never shining quite this way again, the ice cream never quite so sweet, the water never quite so perfect. 

How blessed I am, to have known love and touched it over and over again, every time I walked to my pond, every time I stood in a dinner circle on the island, every time I looked at the face of my best friend, every time I grabbed my love’s hand driving fast on a back road, every time I kissed my dogs’ heads, everytime I ate dinner on a screened-in porch with my parents. 

How blessed to know what I have. How blessed to appreciate it so much it hurts. How blessed I am not to be constantly stuck one step behind, looking back and knowing it was great later, but knowing it right as it happens. How blessed I am to know myself, and how blessed I am to live such a life. 

How blessed to know that I can always return, that it will be different, as home always is, but in so many ways it will be the same. The same blessings, tinged with new memories. The same overwhelming happiness. The same gratitudes. 

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A poem: 

You, Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this. keep it for life—

What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

William Stafford