A few nights ago, Zeko asked me "so where did you think you would live when you grew up? where did you imagine living?"
and the question stumped me just a bit--in part because I have immense difficulty imagining the future (my response was "well. I don't imagine growing up--so the city was always irrelevant.") But giving it a moment's thought--I realized that the answer (if not growing up is not an option, as I am realizing it, sadly, is not with each passing day) would in some way be, 'well. outside the US.'
I've been fortunate enough to spend significant parts (and episodes) of my life abroad: with all the joy/pain/delight/culture shock that brings. While sometime exhausting, the stimulation of being surrounded by new languages, cultures, histories, ways of being and thinking delights and fulfills me.
However. there are passing moments when I see (and thus realize) the pitfalls of being part of a community (spiritually/emotionally/somewhat socially) which I am physically absent from.
This morning I got a facebook friend (oh how I loath how they have co-opted the word friend. but that's another conversation) request from the parent (T.) of a kid I grew up with (D). D. (T's son) and I were always one age group apart--growing up with younger siblings of my friends, but still a member of our childhood cohort--and someone whose path I cross every so often back home. Since I've been gone, T and D lost their wife/mother W. to cancer. The first photos I saw of T.s on fb were of the sign at the gate of the cemetery in our village, just behind the church. followed by flowers, with her name, inscribed on the grey granite just legible beyond the petals.
As kids, we would play among the gravestones, or walk there for gossip or talks, or just to run and shout out child-energy. in elementary school, on memorial day, we would walk from the school to the cemetery to look at the graves of veterans, racing to find the oldest grave; to read the tombstone which a white pine has grown up against, blocking the inscription; to find the grave of the freed slave, laid to rest in our valley. Later, in high school, those stones marked the long walk home from the bus. as an adult, my mother and I have walked countless loops, starting and ending in front of this cemetery, with those stones marking the end and beginning of conversations, seasons, years.
This morning I realized, this place--however overlooked--is an integral part of my sense of place--my feeling of home.
Westminster West is an small enough community that births and deaths are rare--although as the community ages, and the young people (myself included. myself included) move away, community members passing is becoming more frequent. But W. wasn't aged and my childhood was full of her broad smile, her laugh, her Thai food, celebrating Loi Krathong and the dancing lights of our pumpkin lanterns drifting down the Connecticut carrying our blessings for the future (a far cry from the lights on the Mekong, I imagine, but still a beautiful sight).
Although W. passed a year ago this next week--her funeral was this summer, and stumbling across these photos of the family, friends from West West, a landscape so familiar--except for the name on the grave, which, even though I know she has passed makes me gasp, for just one second. Scrolling through these images in a kitchen 4,500 miles away from that little cemetery surrounded by pines, with the square steeple of the church against blue August skies, I weep. For her passing. For T. and D. and for the hole she left in their lives, in our community. For all those missing W.s presence.
and part of me cries for me too: for this absence of home--which I don't feel daily, but rises up out of these photographs, these moments when something changes--permanently. and I am not home to feel it, to experience it, to internalize it, nor to support (and be supported by) these people I love.
and it's a variety of homesickness for which there is no antibody--not to be cured with comfort foods.
(interlude while men come to change the window in our apartment).
It's moments like these where I notice the passage of time, in nearly quantifiable ways. More specifically, I notice the progression of days in places where I am not physically, but still feel integrally connected, spaces which still comprise a fundamental part of me. and where I feel 'slippage' between the present (or at least my present) and the present of places I cannot (and would never want to) let go of, I feel slightly disoriented--as if my north star(s) shift their position in the night sky. These places: my home, in many ways, remain unchanged in my memory, preserved in some internal time capsule; an exhibition in a museum; sounds, smells, movements captured by this novice anthropologist, collecting the traditions of her own life, compiling them into an archive. And when I miss home--these are the relics I paw over, the stories I revisit, the tastes I savor. but this place, this community, this Westminster West is a living tradition. and contained within that life, that vivacity (as it must be) is also death.
The problem--at least as I see it--has little to do with resisting change, but being unaware of it. being excluded physically from so many of the processes which make a community a community, which give it color, texture, substance, and (I think we can argue) meaning. and how to straddle two communities divided by language, culture, space, mentality (although what exactly that means--although it gets used oh so frequently to explain how/why things are the way they are--still puzzles me) and 4,500 miles.
This is not to say that I regret choosing to live abroad. but sometimes, that I wish that these two homes were just a little closer together.
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