Home

While we were back in the States over the past few months several people told us, “It is so good to have you home.” And when we were hugging people goodbye preparing to head back this way, many people said things like, “We are sad to see you go but so happy to know you are going back to your home.” I accept statements like these in the precious spirit out of which they offered - they always make me feel loved. But they never fail to highlight a paradox in my heart, the realization that for many people, home is a specific place or idea, something that can be succinctly articulated by a point on a map, a select handful of people or a specific accumulation of personal belongings.

But for me home is not so neat an idea. It is more like a complex set of muscles that are in a constant state of tension and relaxation. As I move between spaces and places they inhale and exhale, a settled sigh of contentment simultaneous with a subtle bracing. In any one place there is rarely a complete tension, but similarly never a total relaxation, every place various parts familiar and foreign. For me it is always give and take, ebb and flow, the push and pull that moves me down the well-worn paths between my homes.

For instance, in the past three weeks I have been in three places – the American city in which I was born and where my parents now live, the East African city so similar to the place I grew up and where we have a private space to retreat to in times of R and R or evacuations, and my North African home where I have my favorite kitchen stuff and a shelf full of my daughters’ favorite books. Being in these three places in so brief a time has highlighted many of the nuances of home.

An example of one of these is my use of language. Leaving the States is like slipping off the most comfortable house slippers of my mother tongue, American English tinted lightly with the hue of West Texas, lazy “R”s and “ya’ll”s , slipped off and left casually by the front door. Next to them is the pair of sturdy and reliable Birkenstocks I wear most often, the “Airport English” born out of my high school days and used everywhere between West Texas and North Africa. The sharper American edges are worn down into well-worn grooves where my heels regularly tread. East African idioms and British flavored vowels – “For bad luck…”, “I was quite chuffed” and sentences flourished nicely at the end with “isn’t it?”  

And now I strap on my beautiful Arabic sandals, bright beads and delicate straps that pinch a little. At the end of a long day my high arches ache a bit, but the colors make me feel beautiful and happy – vivid green “Mashallah!”s, deep purple “Kalaas”s and the ever useful bright orange code-mixed Harrison-created ejective: “Ya-sa-freaking-laam!” I may still be breaking them in, but this pair is one of my favorites.

After over a week in Kampala - decompressing from our wonderful time in the States, attending some meetings and meeting the doctor who will deliver our baby early next year – we spent all of Friday on an absurdly little plane skirting storms before landing back on our dirt airstrip late in the afternoon. The girls rode home on the donkey cart and Annabelle declared at one point, “Well, this is funner than I remembered!” which seemed to me to be a reference to something bigger and more abstract than just the donkey cart ride, but who knows.

Seeing how gracefully (and effectively) nature begins to reclaim territory you staked out in your five month absence is a humbling thing. Spiders and small rodents have seem astonished by our presence in our own living room, and I am reminded that the battalions of tiny ants that line the walls of the house and window sills are not to be fought off, but merely politely redirected in less obtrusive directions. I could not possibly kill them all.   

And yet even as my creepy-crawly muscles tighten up at the nightly routine of spraying mosquito nets and wiping up every last vestige of food from counter tops within minutes, other muscles are breathing an enormous sigh of relief and relaxing. I love my bedspread and my handmade kitchen curtains that are the colors of all the spices I love to cook with – cumin, cayenne and turmeric. I love the constant purr and cackle of birds overhead and being reminded every time I go to the latrine at night that the Milky Way is not just mythology. I like trading out the rush to meetings with the steady stream of lazy visits. And even though there is a part of me that now tenses up with every unexpected rainstorm, there is another part of me that loves the renewed intimacy with the weather, even as I rush to get clothes off the line or shutter windows closed.

Home. It is a complicated idea to me, made up of lots of little pieces scattered across the globe that could never possible being swept up into one place or time. On some days, I grieve this fact, and envy those who can always regularly return to something so sweet. I have cried a tear or two for a sense of home that I will never have. But on my good days, days like today, I feel absurdly blessed. I gag a little as I sweep up the confetti of ants into a dustpan that had set up camp in the bathroom, and then sit down to a cup of Kenyan tea with my husband in our living room with the sisal rug and while we talk about a new Arabic word we learned or a funny memory from a Jimmy Fallon youtube video that we watched last time we were in Uganda, we watch our girls outside eating green tamarind pods as they climb all over the ATV in their purple dress-up clothes, all while I periodically check my phone to see if the network has come back on so I can text my mom.

Home.

It’s a good place to be.