There and Back Again: or Why I'm Not Writing About My Trip Yet
Also. We bought a house. And lots of book recommendations!
Hi Friends.
There is intention. There is the vision.
Then there is the reality.
The reality is that I did not have time to write before I left for England.
The reality is that I did not feel like writing after I got back.
The idea was a travelogue. A sketch of places I’d been and the meaning they had to me. I’d designed the trip for 14 year old me and all she loved.
I didn’t feel like writing that at all but it took me a few weeks to suss out the reason for my avoidance. The trip was wonderful, that was for sure. But I didn’t feel like parceling it out just yet, taking it moment by moment to put into words for you. It felt like it would distill the story too far, too soon, when for a short span of time, I could experience the trip as one feeling, a suspended emotion memory of light and water and stone.
That feeling is already fading. I’ve been home two weeks. Tomorrow is a month since I embarked.
Return is a funny thing.
I was reading Martha Park’s book World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After this morning. She’s writing about faith and climate change and her father and evangelicalism (not her tradition) in a world wrought with competing stories for how the world is to end. In this excerpt, she’s talking about going back to Memphis and attending church the final year of her father’s ministry in the Methodist church.
Pilgrimage is, by definition, a temporary state, equal parts venturing into-the-world and returning. Maybe the journey home—to this patch of ground, the tenuous, inherited faith, this too-small church that would be our last—was another kind of pilgrimage. (p 68)
I feel a kinship with this sense of tenuous but real meaning in “coming home”. I never thought I’d live back in Central PA. Never thought I’d live a block up from people I grew up with. So when I “come home” from abroad, from a trip made for 14 year old me, I’m coming home to spaces adjacent but distant from her; spaces now constructed and experienced as an adult, streets I once only visited on “mission trips” now streets I walk daily for pleasure, for need, for friendship, for neighborhood yard sales, for getting the wiggles out of the 3yo I’ve somehow raised from a baby... its surreal to be here again. Going away for two weeks and coming back made it all bizarre again.
I also felt the distance between us (me and little Dana) on the trip, a gap that hurts. We’re confused by each other, I think. It was punctuated by one particular literary pilgrimage stop at C. S. Lewis’s home where, as my sister said, “We wouldn’t have liked him if we met him in real life.”
The trip invited me to revisit this younger self and coming home has emphasized that directness of that call all the more.
In addition, we threw down the deepest financial roots we’ve had anywhere: we bought our home.
Robbie and I have been contented renters for many years. The shine of calling someone else to fix any issue just hasn’t worn off. But its also meant that, as we moved through spaces and tried on different lives, we were itinerant tenants. We didn’t hold on to any one place.
[I just looked up if itinerant and tenant share related linguistic histories. They do not. But their english words echo in the way poetry would have them, rhyming their ends and sharp consonant t’s.]
The closest we got was the three years in the Bellefonte Mansion, where we first lived together and got engaged and got married. And the two years on Tweed, where we moved right after I found out I was pregnant with Pippin, where she was born, where she first walked, where we became people entirely new to the world she wrought.
Now, we own a mortgage that holds us in a place more securely than rent. Not that we had any plans on buying. Our landlord told us April 1st we’d have to move out by May 31st. She was going to sell it. It seemed like a bad April Fools’ day joke. It wasn’t. We also lost our home in Maryland, Tweed Street, its leafy streets and spacious yard, soft carpeted floors, the same way. The landlord wanted it back. We offered to buy Tweed too. He wasn’t interested. Our landlord here wasn’t interested either, or she was, but her realtor was pushing for an open market bidding war. The whole negotiation was derailed multiple times. I’d call our landlord and talk our way back in, try to leave the realtor market negotiation out of what should have been easy—there was a house she wanted to sell and we wanted to buy it. Easy.
We closed Friday.
We didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to leave our little street in Midtown. Didn’t want to renegotiate the pace of our daily lives. And yet the first thing we did was tear out a bookcase some previous tenant had constructed, and completely rearrange the first floor. I joked to my neighbor that we were still moving despite our insistence on not moving, given the massive piles of my books underfoot as we moved everything we owned into new configurations. My wise neighbor responded, “But you’re moving out of their house into your house.”
He’s right. It already feels like a place that’s ours.
I handed Pippin a marker and told her she could draw whatever she wanted on a wall in her bedroom. She drew two big, wobbly circles as big as she could, her shoulder the center, her arm the radius. She asked me to write her name in small letters.
So I did.
Love,
Dana
Round up!
Read Martha Park’s book. So beautiful.
Jade T Perry has an upcoming course on divination. I wouldn’t learn to read tarot from anyone else. Learn more at her newsletter.
Why gluten is different in Europe. I ate whatever I wanted for two weeks. I ate gluten yesterday at the local Greek Fest (worth it) and have aching joints today. Absurd.
Also read what Nellie Croy Smith is cooking up. Astute explication of the un-reality feelings many of us have had lately.
Disability parenting. Which is to say, undoing parenting and humaning as a means of optimization. What love looks like in truth rather than performance.
Persephone books is now one of my new favorite places on earth.