I don’t do it well. If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, then you know this about me. Travel and the ensuing return– transitions of any kind, really– throw me for the proverbial loop. What does it mean to be gone from Here? What does it mean to be Someplace Else? And why does Someplace Else seem infinitely better than Here? Why do I live Here? What does it mean to be home?
Ridiculous, I know. And not terribly helpful.
For this last trip, I left the house Ultra Clean. Ultra. And that made returning Decidedly Easier. Because when the suitcases had their inevitable explosion, I wasn’t culling the dirty laundry from the clean in a space already peppered with Lego pieces, extraneous footwear, and a dirt ring in the bathroom sink. But Still, I was coming home to here, and here isn’t the home I grew up in with the people I grew up with. Here isn’t North, with (usually) breathable air at the end of July. Here isn’t blue and green and yellow like the edges of Peconic Bay. Here doesn’t have the wind rushing up the shore at evening, and the trees singing (all singing) their songs at night.
The truth is that last week went just fine. And this was good, as the first week after a trip, for me, can be Difficult. It’s not that I don’t get things done. It’s just that I seem to fail, chronically, for a week or so, to engage in “home.” It’s as if life is fuzzy around the edges for a few days. I have a hard time believing (or remembering, maybe) that what goes on here matters, that I am an active participant in it all. I just can’t quite get a grip on things.
But like I said, it went well enough. Everett had his party with his classmates at the pool– the party I had planned and mailed invitations for at the beginning of July. The children had their physicals for school. We did chores and cooked dinner and went to the pool and to church and basically behaved like citizens of North Carolina. But I missed my sisters, both of whom I’d seen the previous week. And I missed my parents. I missed having Bill around all the time. I missed being Away.
Saturday night came. I was tired (why is it that we always need to rest up after a vacation?) and wasn’t especially excited to do anything. Children to bed early, maybe, and a mind-numbing movie to put responsibility out of mind– something to fend off the reality of a return to teaching in just a very few weeks. Yes, torpor and sleep sounded good.
But we went out anyway. Our friend Katie was hosting a house-concert– Katie the guitar-playing, hammered-dulcimer-playing, clarinet-playing friend. Katie who homeschooled her children for a Long Time, all of whom are talented musicians in their own right. Katie who lives out in the country and bakes homemade bread for dinner and who lives in a way that makes you say, “That’s the way to do it.” The concert was at Katie’s house.
The performers were Ken Kolodner and Robin Bullock, a hammered-dulcimerist (?) and a fiddler, respectively, and their attentive audience was no fewer than 70 in number, all sitting nicely on folded chairs on Katie and Travis’s brand-new deck. We were six (having brought along our friend Brian), and we knew Margie and Michael and Fulton, too, and of course Katie’s family of five. But other than that, this house-concert was attended by strangers all (though very attentive), quietly sitting on Katie’s deck.
We were late (surprise, surprise), and only a few empty chairs remained at the back of the crowd. I elected to sit on the grass, very near the small pile of sawdust that the deck’s creation obviously required. I was happy to sit on the lawn, happy to keep to myself, happy to remember that only a week ago I had been at a lobster-fest with my Long Island family, watching the wind whip the blue water up to the yellow shore, listening to the trees.
We’d only stay for the first half, Bill and I had decided. We wouldn’t stay long. But the air wasn’t hot. Not at all. And the music was just So Lovely: Celtic and Norwegian and Scottish and something Appalachian too. The performers were good– So Good– and they spoke quietly and made us laugh, and their voices sounded like wood well-worn and like the smell of books. And when the intermission came, Margie found her way over to me, and then Katie came out of the house bringing me a glass of red wine, and when the music started again we didn’t leave right away at all.
Bill sat next to me on the grass, and the violinist played something beautiful written for an Irish bishop in some medieval century, back when being a Catholic in Ireland was against the law. I looked up to see a fading Carolina blue sky, all tinged in yellow where the sun hit the clouds. Emma Grace came and buried my bare feet in the cool sawdust, then went away again, chasing a toad that hopped across the lawn. The air was cool, but not too cool, and effortless, really, to breathe. And the topmost leaves of a plane tree, dark green in the dusky light, twisted in an invisible breeze.
