The Jessop's House

Sometimes when you have been looking forward to something for a long time, you build it up in your mind so much that it has no chance of ever being anything other than a disappointment. This past week my family got together on the coast of Kenya for the first time in over two years. We hadn’t seen each other since my sister Deborah’s wedding which, as anyone who has ever planned or been in a wedding knows, is hardly quality time. I had never been around Josh as a brother-in-law. Deborah had never been around Annabelle as an Aunt. We three girls hadn’t been together as sisters in way too long and my parents were way overdue for time with all of their overgrown chicks under their wings at once. We had been looking forward to those few days altogether through years of years of emails, texts, facebook messages and pixilated skype calls. The thought of being within hugging distance of every member of my immediate family for a few days was almost too good to be true. And I think we were all braced for the possibility that it just might be.

But it wasn’t. Last week was every bit as sweet as I could have hoped. The hours spent talking, eating, playing cards, playing with the baby, swimming and sticking our heads together for just one more picture were like a flavor you just want to keep savoring a little bit longer. What a joy it was to reminisce about old times and get to know each other all over again as adults, grandparents, fathers, mothers, husbands and wives. And though we would have been happy spending time together just about anywhere, it certainly didn’t hurt to be basking in each others company at the Jessop’s house. These family friends had been kind enough to invite us to stay with them when they heard we were passing through. Their home is forever etched in my mind, a haven on the beach, detached from reality and the normal passage of time.

The yellow stone house sits drunkenly on a coral cliff overlooking the ocean, clashing beautifully with the sprays of fuchsia bougainvillea that cascade madly down the rock face. If you stand on the back veranda and look through the jungly mango trees to your left, you can just make out the crumbling remains of minarets and well rims, the only fingerprints of a 14^th century village abandoned mysteriously hundreds of years ago, like an East African Roanoke. The rooms of the house are deep and cool and strung together as beads on a dropped string. And like the mesmerizing pages of a children’s “I Spy” book, they are full of everything a house by the sea should have: baskets of seashells, blue glass bottles full of sand, ceramic fish, spotted mirrors in driftwood frames, sea turtle bones, paintings of Dhows of the coast of Zanzibar and shelves overflowing with paperback novels with curling yellow pages. Salt breeze moves constantly through the open windows brushing against unseen windchimes as it slinks by.

We spent three nights at this house together. And on the third day, the afternoon before Bryan, Annabelle and I were to fly back to Nairobi while the rest of the family traveled on to Tanzania, I realized I miss my family most in the hours before we actually say goodbye. The franticness of loading up the car and the anxiety of a last quick huddled prayer at the airport mask the heartache of separation in a weird way. But in those final sweet moments of togetherness, when the chai is still hot in the cup, the cards are still dealt for seven, and the conversation is quiet because all the new stories have been told and there is time leftover to just be, sadness scoots in too close, like an uninvited guests and watches over my shoulder. It takes in the scene, one detail at a time, and presses it against my heart. Tomorrow there will be tears and kisses and a bittersweet cacophony of goodbyes. But today, listening to laughter and the nonsense that comes with absolute peace, I feel my heart give just a little as it breaks under the weight of such joy.

Scratch

Last night in the shower I was hit with an unexpected bout of cultural vertigo. I had bent over under the shower head pounding out almost-too-hot water to scrub the city off of my feet when I noticed a thin scratch on the inside of my ankle. Nearly healed but still raised and pink, it was half-hidden under a swath of raspberry lather. I had forgotten all about the scratch but seeing it again caused a flurry of ripples on the still surface of my heart. I remembered exactly when I got it. About two weeks ago three women carrying heavy loads of firewood home had stopped to rest under a tree outside our fence. Our guard had taken a pitcher of water out to them and had come back with word that they wanted to see the khawaja baby. I had time to kill so I went outside with Annabelle and sat down on the long rough tree roots and watched them pass my daughter between them. We had the most normal conversation. How's your family? How are your kids? How many do you have? How far away is your house? Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the pleasant kind of talk that you can sometimes have with strangers. While we chatted goats grazed on the hill behind us and our guard plucked out wiry tunes on his robaba that hovered hesitantly in the still air. Five or six boys loped by like a pack of hunting dogs, shiny and clean from a bath in the gulley full of brown rain water. I rummaged around in my brain for misplaced Arabic words and they chatted to each other every once in a while in their shared mother tongue. When we ran out of things to say we just sat under the tree and looked at the baby. Eventually the sun was low enough on the horizon that the hungriest mosquitoes were braving their way out, so we rose to go our separate ways. But when I stood up I stepped back into one of the loads of firewood and gashed my ankle on a rough splinter. It didn't hurt that badly and I had forgotten all about it until last night. But standing on a tile floor in a bathroom cloudy with steam, it was weird to see that mark on my ankle and remember the day I got it. I was reminded of a day and a place that felt so very far away and yet amazingly, were as close as unhealed skin. There is a line in a Maya Angelou poem about someone waking from a dream of a walk by the sea and reaching down to find sand in their pockets. I felt like that last night. Like I had dreamed of another home and woken up with it's scars on my skin.

We're in Nairobi. Again. We were supposed to be here at this point anyway. We have a conference to attend in a few days. But we left North Africa a week early after news (rumors? stories? reports?) of more soldiers, more airplanes, more artillery, more threats reached a point that we felt like it was time to go, for now anyway. Our prayer is that things will be fine for us to go back in a week or so. After all, nothing has happened in our state as of yet. Of the three "contested areas" one has been razed to the ground and the other is being inundated with bombs. But our state hasn't been touched. Does this mean nothing will ever happen? Does this mean it's only a matter of time? Who knows. My biggest fear is that this wretched anticipation of nothingness will linger on for weeks and months leaving us in perpetual uncertainty.

I hate how far away that place feels when I am here. Missing there terribly and enjoying here thoroughly rub against each other like bare feet in too-small shoes leaving me feeling chaffed.