January: Coming Home

Coming home.

For many, the comfort of home and place, security and community, of stability and routine is all they want. For me, it’s complicated.

With my year abroad (too quickly) done, I’m home again for a while. For the while (as the dream is) that it’ll take me to earn enough money to go out again. And then again. And again.

I step out of a plane, out of a car, and here I am. Home. Home?

Home is so familiar. Even so, it strikes me as strange in its familiarity. It’s a shoe that my foot hasn’t worn for some time and feels odd against the arch, against the sole. It’s a glove that fits, but doesn’t fit any more because the styles have changed. It’s rose-colored glasses that have turned another subtle, different shade.

The acrid scent of Busyness, motion, action, production, achievement, go, go, go, chases me like the smoke from my parents’ chiminea. I can smell it on my sweater and in my hair. Curly-cue whirls, tiny sparks, what are you going to do, do, do, do, do?

It’s a running static in the air crackling the message out that there is no time for forest wandering, sunshine sitting, contemplation, silent staring out the window, silent staring not out the window (“is everything all right?), for aimless walking, for writing, for endless reading (just for fun? For work? For what?), for being less, doing less than any other busy, American adult.

Maybe that smoke was everywhere I’ve gone, but I only smell it now that it wants to envelop me; that glorified busyness.

I borrow my mom’s car to run errands because I don’t have the time to walk everywhere. Don’t I have the time? Well, the distances are so great. The convenience is too convenient. I become more sedentary. My legs ache with sitting. I feel guilty about my thinking that gets me nowhere fast. Think faster. Do more. Get with the program. Make some money. My sister and I go walk the Green Belt trail that we’ve walked since our childhoods, past the creek that we used to play in, swim in, wade in, that’s now lined with plastic bags, plastic bottles, wrappers, detritus, mess.

The litter offends me hanging ugly from tree branches and mixing with the dirt and the dry, winter grass that make up the sloping sides down into the creek, lining both sides of the path we take. If only I had the time to gather it all up, I think, and then chide myself for going with the easiest excuse for getting out of making a difference. Shame on me. Too busy. Too busy. Too busy to care. No one has time to clean it out. Not even me.

Home is a complication of childhood, growing up, expectation, familiarity, and a throwing me out of my past year’s routines. Who am I? Who am I now? What am I going to do, do, do, do, do? I sit at the dining room table and make lists. The dogs bark.

I think of how Virginia Woolf said that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

“By hook or by crook,” she said, “possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”  

I’m working on the by hook or by crook. I’m working on possessing myself of money enough. All the rest is the beautiful dream.

For writing stories matters. Traveling and idling are what I love. And the world is my home and I want to be out in it.