home

When my mother locked the front door of my childhood home for the last time, she might as well have doused it with kerosene and lit a match. Every report card and award that said how smart I was, every pencil line on the door frame marking my growth, every homemade valentine my little hands had liberally sprinkled with glitter…Mommy I love you!, poof. All gone.

She was kicking up dust, getting fitted in minks and diamonds, ready for a marriage that would take her away on a European honeymoon while I moved in with a strange girl who smelled like cheese for my first year of college.

I did not have the vocabulary or the skill or the courage to say how will I find you? Where is home now? Would someone please hold me?

What could I rescue from the flames? All my diaries gone to garbage collection along with the clothes I had outgrown.  No sentimental relics from my babyhood, no booties, not even a photo album in a box to be shipped to her new home when she returned. Even my beloved Steinway piano sold to a Russian who trucked it away before I could play one last Moonlight Sonata.

What could I stuff in my pockets? Gravel from the driveway where I let my boyfriend explore my body until the porch light came on and I was hauled inside?

Could I preserve a dogwood blossom from the tree that broke out in astonishing beauty every spring, white against red brick, green glinting with dew. Could I take just that?

Or maybe a branch from the weeping willow tree my mother sat under that hot summer when she was nine months pregnant with me, her swollen feet in a bucket of ice water, she a goddess of girth and contentment, for one sweet moment her sorrows softened by the shade of a weeping tree.

Could I take the heat that choked my upstairs bedroom, or the way the snow tumbled in fat flakes past the street lamp or the sound of my roller skates on concrete or oh please yes, maybe somehow I could stuff in my college suitcase the look on my father’s face as he let go of the two wheeler the night I rode off on my own down the street and then back, beaming, beaming, falling into his open arms.

None of that could I take. None of that came with me. Only this: a round stone from the cold stormy sea where my grandmother taught me to swim.

I carry it with me always, and place on every windowsill in every home I have ever made.

But still. There is a home I am searching for that remains out of sight, just over the rise, beyond the bend. It is a place of peace and forgiveness where the small one inside of me can finally rest, curl up in her own bed, turn the light off knowing she’s safe. And maybe I will walk across deserts dragging a tattered hope behind me like a much loved doll, looking for this home, always out of reach, always just around the next curve.

And maybe it is the despair of the world I am feeling, a yearning for peace and safety for our families, a home where our children can grow up rooted on land that has been tended for generations by our ancestors.

Maybe it is the agony of displacement, of watching it all go up in flames, that brings me to my knees each morning in prayers for peace. For the sweet, simple comfort of a home we can all return to at the end of the day and be greeted by warmth, by safety, by laughter and the familiar smells of food cooked with love. Maybe my longing is the longing of a world wanting only to go home to a place where we are each other’s trusted neighbors.

I have wandered, been uprooted by wind and fate and the imperative to keep seeking, across time and borders, a place that feels like home. And now when I do not know where I am, I am guided by the compass of my heart to rest my head on my beloved’s chest, because what I long for I left so long ago with nothing in my pockets except the grief from a small child’s bedroom, the scent of a blossom, the echo from a song heard long ago. When all I have is a stone from a stormy sea anchoring me to the past I rest my head on his chest and say – you are my home, and in that one still moment it is comfort enough.

“I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.” ~ Joy Harjo