Belonging Away from Home

"I wish you were here. No. I don't."

The sun was shining today, with a clear shot to the lake’s surface, where the geese were as elegantly raucous as a gaggle of old women in oversized sunglasses after their third glass of wine.

It was a marked contrast to the soft clicking of the squirrels, and the seesaw-singing of the small great tits in the grove.

Spring comes quietly and late to the shadows.

Two weeks ago, from the train, I saw ducklings near the reeds. But today I saw none among the mallards and hens. I counted instead three red squirrels scampering up a pine tree, and ten fiddleheads ready to unfurl at its base.

I’ve only been away a week, but have this fear of having missed so much of the season. I think that is what I’ve walked away from cancer with: this grasping at time—specifically at the Earth’s spinning through time. In time. With time.

I believe if the Earth stopped spinning we couldn’t comprehend the decaying of our bodies, and the literal circling of life on the planet would stop. Though we would notice all living things sliding out of shape like sandcastles loosening with their own weight, we’d have neither hope nor despair—since the existence of either is contingent upon a symbiotic existence. The push and the pull. Like a tide.

Life relies on movement.

The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?

In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.

Of course there’s a tension between comfort and destruction. They’re also interdependent. The continual sliding of the note between the two is what makes our feelings resonant.

The buildings here are in various states of decay, but the poverty difficult to measure. Against what? A taxi driver complains about the inflation and asks my colleague and I how much money we make a year. There’s no meaningful answer to that question. And certainly not something that can be constructively discussed from the backseat of a taxi: relative wealth.

I watch a woman walk back into her concrete block house, the chickens are fanning out over the yard where she’s thrown the grain. I can’t hear the clucking through the window, but I can hear it. In the 80s, I fed chickens like that. I shovelled coal into the furnace in the mornings, before I showered and left for the school bus. We got our water from the cistern under the front porch, and conserved it in creative ways. I was rural Kentucky poor.

Relative wealth, yes: a tension between hope and compare. It’s honestly impossible to say whether I am fine with it now because I have learned, or because I have left. (No matter what I would like to claim as truth.)

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother would say into the phone, “I miss you. I wish you were here—no, I don’t. You’re better off there.” I don’t know how many times she “misspoke” with this sentence. She wasn’t talking about chickens and coal furnaces. She was talking about a better off place to belong. To be loved. She was projecting her hope in a way that made me resonant—sliding between her hope and my despair during those difficult days in a way that made me define my fears in a new way. I also understood that hope was intrinsic to love.

I don’t know that she ever found that kind of belonging for herself. Lately, I think about this a lot. How she was—for all the years I knew her—largely unmoved.

I imagine a matrix of tensions between hope and despair, between ambition and self-preservation, between faith and fear, between stasis and growth.

In Bucharest, when I reach for the non-existent seatbelt again, this taxi driver too says, “No worries.” And I remember when I would suspend my worries when I travelled. Fearless or foolhardy. I still don’t know. Travelling was a kind of fictional space, out of “real” life, and out of time. It was a place that was both dangerous and entirely make-believe. It was stepping into a novel that you knew you could put down when things got ugly.

And on the beautiful warm beaches of Spain and Greece, I’d imagine, through the lens of a single day or a single week, what it would be like to live in those places. The “If we could just…” places. Where I’d imagine that everything else in the world would stop. And this day would continue, unchanging.

Either everything or nothing changes within the parenthesis of a week away from home.

And either way, if you suspend your consideration of how the world keeps turning, you risk returning to “real” life unmoved.

With some pretty pictures.

When I travel now, I take far fewer pictures. But I enjoy the experience more—somewhere along the axis of terror and a love for the spinning Earth—for women in headscarves who feed chickens at 9 am in the last of this year’s snow flurries, for my students struggling with too many assignments and too little time. I send them my hope that they understand, or will understand, that they belong to this Spinning Earth. No matter what else they desire from this life, it begins with this inalienable belonging.

“I wish you were here.”

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Photo by Andreea Pop on Unsplash

Thank you for taking the time to read.

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I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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