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.