I was homesick. Although having already lived in Vermont for two years after my dad took a job there, I was still homesick for Texas, my family, and my friends back home. That Christmas, my grandmother sent me a gift in a small square jewelry box. I opened it with all of a thirteen-year-old’s anticipatory joy. Inside, on a bit of tissue paper lay a key. With the tissue and the key was a note which said: So you can let yourself in whenever you want.
In all truth, I don’t actually remember the exact words that were written in my grandmother’s handwriting on that note. But the message was clear: My home is your home. Come whenever you want. I love you and I like having you near.
I cried when I opened that gift. For even though I was 1600 miles away, even though I didn’t know when I would be back, I had a way to open the door. A door that would never really be locked for me. A door that was a door but was also my grandmother’s love for me.
The next year, when my dad’s work moved us back to Texas, I used that key all the time.
I spent hours visiting with my grandmother at her house. In those days, sometimes calling ahead and sometimes not, I often put that key into the doorknob and turned it open. Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t. But I was always welcome. And when I left the house, if she was there when I was ready to leave, she’d stand at the door and watch until I’d walked or driven away.
As happens, the years changed me. The homesickness I’d had as a child for Texas turned into farsickness, what the Germans call fernweh, a longing for places I hadn’t yet been to, for adventures yet to be lived. I turned from a homebody homesick for home to a homebody who took her home with her on adventures. When I went, my grandmother was the voice on the other end of a long-distance line when I spent months (that time homesick again) in Mexico after graduating high school. She was a more-than-once visitor with my grandfather after I moved to Colorado to train in judo and then stayed. And stayed. A decade after that, she was supportive when I sold my things, rented out my house, and moved to Peru for a year.
And that was just
the beginning.
As my wanderlust took me farther away, she always told me, “That will make for a good story one day,” and called me her favorite author. I blogged as I went so that she could be where was I was, meet who I met, see what I’d seen. I called her as often as I could. Both fiction and nonfiction, I sent her all my stories. It was my way of giving her a key to my house. And she loved them all, rereading them over and over again, even when the fictional characters in one of my books compelled her to tell me, “Of course, your moral compass is different than mine. So I wanted Jessica to quit dealing and Kenzie and DeShawn to stop smoking marijuana, join the Baptist church, and go out evangelizing.”
Though my characters did not repent, and my moral compass stayed different than hers, every time I came back to visit, her door was unlocked for me. In fact, she would stick religiously to home whenever I was in town, on the off chance that I would stop by. And I would, I’d go inside and sit in my favorite chair and she would sit in hers and we would catch up face-to-face.
Each time, when I left again and called her from some other place, while I could hear the “I wish you were here,” in her voice, she didn’t say it (not too often anyway) because she knew I had a need to fly and she wasn’t one to clip my wings.
On the day she died, when I was with her, sitting in a chair next to her bed reading to her, I paused the story for a moment to say, “You know I love you and I know you love me. I’m going to be okay and you’re going to be okay too.” Maybe it was too much to assume that she would be okay dying. Maybe it was too much to assume that I will be okay for the days I have left in my life. But it seemed the right thing to say because being okay means being loved. Being okay means, I love you and I like having you near. Being okay means love. Being okay is a home with a door and even if it’s locked, that’s not a problem for, long ago, she gave me the key that I needed to unlock it and come inside.
