I often write when things weigh too heavy on my shoulders to carry anymore. I lift the weight away by writing it down.
So I type this from my puddle of tears. The steady stream of sadness has followed me everywhere this week, back and forth and back again, to camp and Costco and dropping off dry-cleaning and picking up kids. Inside my head I have written this post in a million perfect fragments while the Avett Brothers soothed my soul and SoCal floated past my window. In front of my screen now with iced Tazo tea and humus those perfect bits are gone, flown right out of my mind now that I sit down to look for them. But the heaviness remains, so I will try to delve in and scribble something of this longing down to lift the burden.
Home.
I didn’t know how badly I wanted one until we started looking for a house. I didn’t want to move AGAIN, but it seemed like a good time to find a house and so the hunt began. Somewhere between peeking into people’s sad stories and glimpsing fairy tales I realized I was looking for a fireplace where the kids would remember hanging stockings ten times over. I was eyeing yards to see if they could hold a garden which would take root deeply enough to tie us to this spot on the globe that I love so much. A garden that could grow just the right type of overgrown like a familiar chair and nourish us as only a piece of earth cultivated for many years can. I was sizing up trees to see if they held a secret spot that could be pointed out to grankids under our breath. I was searching for golden light through windows and dreaming of backyard dinner parties. I was meeting neighbors and researching, researching, researching…
We thought we had found the one. But home inspections, appraisals, escrow paperwork, lots of coffee and talking, organizing, yard sales, feeling scared to death and absolutely giddy at the same time all turned into nothing. We asked God to close the door if this wasn’t right. Even though it stood wide open, we walked away.
Today “our” house is back on the market and it feels like a party I’m not invited to or a friend I turned my back on. The closing date we waited almost two months for will come and go without us next week and it feels a bit like a due date or birthday that should have been but never happened. Not really like those at all because it’s just a house. Except that it wasn’t just a house, somehow my mind had turned it into everything I didn’t even know I longed so deeply for. That part deep within my heart crying out for Home. The Home I want my children to know, that I hoped could somehow shelter my family from everything I know is still ahead in life.
What if and Why are pounding in my head. Driving home to the Pixies belting out “Where is my Mind” sure sounds like truth right now. I don’t know, I just don’t know. But at least now I think I know how much I don’t know and how deeply I am yearning. Yearning not just for home but for community. My life feels like so many echoes of leaving home, never quite holding onto or finding what I really need or want the most. Until them, three crazy boys and one crazier man. I have held onto them for dear life and that has been my saving grace. And now is not the time to uproot their tender shoots even if it is only to move a few blocks away. Now is the time to revel in six and eight and his babyness of almost two. Now is the time to save and wait and see what God will do next.
Save and trust that God can give Home and Community without a heavy mortgage or more moving trucks.
There is so much that lies deep at the heart of me that can’t be written down here. Hurts from others that would devastate them for me to point out. My fears and failures that are much too painful to speak out loud. I’m guessing the same is true for you. We each have our dark corners, our scarred and fragile parts. I have run from friends, ashamed of failing them. I have sidestepped amazing experiences because of fear. At the bottom of it all, I have always felt like an outsider and I have often lost myself trying to fit in.
So many echoes of homesickness… one stands out amongst the rest. So many dreams as a little girl playing in the magic hour of a home schooled childhood. My mother baked bread, taught me to read, gave me Narnia, back tickles and all her love. She wore her long hair in a bun and walked us to the park with buttons down her skirt. She couldn’t buy me the horse I wanted but we finally moved a few miles into the country and a horse and camels moved in next door. Camels trained and tended by a young man rescued starving off the street a continent away. He became my friend, always the gentleman in his own goofy way. “Eat some donuts and stop flopping around up there on that horse! You’re too skinny.” I was growing too fast and jutting out awkward in all the wrong places. His father let me ride and care for their Quarter Horses as if they were my own. Nimit’s ten acre farm became my home apart from the crazy confusion of public school I had just entered. I would wait at our door till I saw his old blue truck with the weather worn stripes pull through the gate two blocks away. The truck scattered with junk food that he let me drive and laughed like crazy when I backed it into his fence. I would yell to Mom and run like crazy through the field to flop down on hay bales with a Dr Pepper before chores and riding. I was at that barn all day, every day except for summer visits to Gran in Kansas. I would come back tan from hours at her pool eating Cheetos and Dove bars on squishy blue floats with cupholders in the armrests. “You got as black as me! Blacker! Now get back to work!” was his greeting that I always looked forward to. Friends and animals were constantly passing through those few acres and the magic that it held.
How is it that I left that tiny community of donkeys, horses, sheep, goats, cows, camels, African travelers, and kids from down the street? What took me away from the warm breath of Doc’s muzzle on my cheek and long trail rides through neighbors’ pastures to the quarry and back. Fear. I didn’t think I could ever really fit in or keep up with the farm kids who I rode with and competed against in 4-H. Nimit and his Dad trailering me and Doc to all the camps and shows, didn’t care a bit how well we did. Why couldn’t I see they were just happy to see us riding? There was talk of him building a new barn and my parents were busy trying to make ends meet and I didn’t know if I could make it there if the farm wasn’t a short walk away… And I didn’t want my heart to break. Easier just to drift away than to get ever more deeply attached to a life and a horse that wasn’t really mine. All this business of owning things confuses the reality of the good gifts God provides. Why didn’t someone tell me, “This doesn’t come along everyday. This is church and miracle and everything you have hoped for, but those things never look quite the way you imagined.”
Years later I called him up, stopped by, met the bride he brought back from over the sea. He drove us to his new barn, me in the backseat stealing sidelong looks at her beauty while I listened to him talk. Him just the same as I remembered, always with a new adventure, full to the brim with the life he had been given, never content unless he was giving it away. He told of trips through the desert aboard camels with business men, showing them adventure and raising their money for his homeland and people. He showed me around his fine new barn atop a hill and told me of all the travelers and visitors streaming through, described the parties and the campfires and I felt a twinge down deep. That twinge turned into a searing ache when he surprised me with a drive out to see Doc. Still his beautiful self, brown coat turning to ebony at the edges, but turned out to pasture a bit before his time. “No one to ride him” said Nimit, as honest as he always was. Doing for other’s what they only dreamed of and never holding a grudge or whispering a complaint unless it was a sarcastic jib to make you laugh, that was how he lived. So why was I surprised when he pulled out a saddle and insisted I take one more ride. He smiled and said “That old nag, he remembers you.” Me trying not to cry as I felt all his forgetting beneath the saddle, between the stirrups. That horse used to be so confident, always taking care of me, but he had gone a bit wild with no one to reign him in.
I don’t really remember the ride back to his house to pick up my car. I was just trying to sort through what all I had lost and why . . . Now I know that was just the beginning of losing. And I can see that those days lieing lazy on top of a warm horse’s back, staring up at sun and sky, those days were Home. Just like sand caked boys and waves and red bougainvillea splashed everywhere are Home now. Our donut shop and the way I know every curve of that orange hill on 101 are Home, just not the kind of home you can buy. And I want SO desperately for my boys to grow up here, to be able to say that we are FROM here. This place is the only place that has ever really felt like home. The first time we drove across the state line we knew we had found where we were made for and it’s the only spot we have not quickly been ready to move on from to see what else might be out there.
People here are beautiful inside and have welcomed us into their lives. But once again, I’m afraid someone will decide that I’m a fraud. I’m from the midwest and trees and fields and green still run deep in my veins. People and circumstances recently seem to keep repeating the question, “Who are you?” And so I echo, Who am I? Why do I feel the need to hide? Is it because the only women who seem to have it easy have fuller lips and breasts and bank accounts than I? Is it because everyone seems to have their circle and once again I am the one without a chair when the music stops? I read recently that Home is wherever there is love. Such a simple statement and I am sure we would all agree but do we honestly live like this is fully true? Or is home where I have plenty of space to myself or live on the right street? Does home have to have granite counter tops or thrift store feng shui? I would like to believe that Home really does abide anywhere there is honest love made possible by grace. And I think the first step away from fear and towards love may just be acknowledging who I am and letting go all the rest…
I am a human being who has done things I wish I had not and who believes that Jesus has saved my soul. I left my art school circle of friends because they wanted no part of the God that I so desperately needed. Swing dancing in living rooms lit by vintage lamps covered in thin handkerchiefs and parties on old cracked cement porches, powered by wine and falafel and Built to Spill were where I felt at home. But Home has to include my maker and He was not invited or welcomed in their scene and so I had to leave. Since those college days I have married a man I love but am so. very. different from. Lord knew we would need each other, our strengths filling eachother’s weaknesses. I have waited in fear while he has gone off to war. A war that myself and many others felt might not be necessary or advised but was none the less as real as America and apple pie, just not nearly as wholesome. Ten years of long exhausting days have flown by. Days that have held my very best moments and my darkest hours. I am not the mother I wish I was or know I need to be, but I try. And unlike most people, each precious friendship made I have had to move on from and each ugly memory has been left many miles away every few years. I am living in a strange divide presently that I cannot even begin to put into words. Most days my children feel like the only sure footing. The intense yearning of who I am as an artist in this epic place crashes against the culture of my husband’s workplace that I do not connect with or understand. My husband’s job that pays the bills to make all our lives possible and takes him above the clouds where he belongs. He called me an earth dweller tonight, him who is always in the sky. Things look different for him from up there, no wonder he can soar along life’s path with more ease than I. He’s always flying on and on and I wonder will he ever land and see things as I do? I am down here with rocks looming large in the road and dust and dirt as constant travel companions. I have packed up Home and moved it again and again so that he can fly on… and his fearless flying has literally bought me the lens I see this world through. It is a funny grown up life we are living.
When I heard of Nimit’s death I wished I could have been torn with grief, my life shaken because his barn was still a home to me, his horses and his smile some of my closest friends. Bu I had moved on in my awkward foolish way, always trying to find where I belong. I sheepishly said how sorry I was for their loss, hating that it took a funeral for me to see his parents again. I was stunned at how fractured my life had become. They were in shock that their son had been shot out of hatred for how he was helping his people, the poorest of the poor in a country so different from our own. I have dreams some nights that I drive around a corner to find his barn and him hard at work feeding the horses, training the camels. He always asks me matter of fact where I have been and tells me to get to work. I wake up disappointed just like a I did as a little girl when I dreamed I got a pony for my birthday. But I know someday we will all be home and the trees and the ocean, the garden with the well worn path and all the misplaced friendships will be there and we won’t ever have to move on. We will linger forever and put our roots down deep into Home.
I am reminded of our one true hope but still my heart beats wistfully tonight. Drifting through the house I pick up the day’s scattered remains, toys in every corner and dishes in the sink. I tidy our rooms and my thoughts and try not to think of how the sunrise would have woken me up every morning in that new house, how the light would have fallen perfect golden each night through their window onto the window seat where I imagined we would cuddle and read. I feel raw right down to my core, all the little bits I try to push away bubbling to the surface. I’m sure you know the feeling. How a loss, big or small cuts through the quick, peeling off the tough layers and leaving everything a bit raw and stinging to the touch. Day to day normally dulls the twinge of pain, but in this space of reflection the hurts are felt as they really are, scraping across the tender flesh of our soul. The tiniest prick is felt and it is good to know we hold this much depth of feeling. Raw and real and getting to the heart of what truly matters in my life, I am reminded about those dreams I put away. What I would do if I had resources at my disposal and my boys’ future was provided for? It’s not a big house or a new car I dream of. I have known since before he was gunned down at that wedding a world away. I know but am afraid to acknowledge how desperately I want to give a dark skinned child life and love as he was given. I dream of a little one from a distant land where food is scarce, wrapped close to my chest as my own or walking hand in hand. I long for a horse in the backyard and room for boys to run and run. And I hope to see the corners of this world to help me find my way back to Home. It all sounds too grand and maybe even foolish put down in words, but I can’t carry it locked up inside anymore . . .
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