Home Again
As regular readers of my blog are no doubt aware, I’ve traveled to some of the most exotic destinations on earth. From volunteering in Ghana, to teaching in Taiwan, to an overland safari covering half of Africa. I’ve lived in Egypt and Iraq, been to most of the countries in the Middle East, dallied a bit in Europe, and worked and traveled in Asia. These adventures have changed who I am as a person, and helped me to better understand the world in which we all live. Whenever I have time and cash to spare, I’m on a flight to unusual destinations, looking to expand my horizons and experience new cultures.
This holiday weekend, I decided to change my modus operandi and come home to my family. Visiting my parents’ house doesn’t hold childhood memories. They’ve moved several times since I was a child, and the last move took them from Seattle to Spokane. So I have come ‘home’, though not to memories, nor even the same city. I’m not sleeping in my old bedroom, I’m not near my old friends, nor can I look out the window at the much-used vacant lot I played in with the other children in our old neighborhood.
Yet, the feeling of home still pervades in this new house. Family members packed the living room for Thursday night’s dinner, laughing and over-eating as on any proper Thanksgiving. There was a lot of catching-up to do: several people had flown in for their annual visit, children had grown exponentially in the interim, stories needed to be swapped and new jokes told.
At the end of the evening, after everyone had trickled out the door and only my immediate family was left, we picked up where we had left off the last time we’d seen each other. A few bottles of wine saw us through the evening as we alternated between snarky comments and genuine interest in each others’ lives. I realized that while I knew the gist of what each family member did for a living, I really didn’t have a clue what their day to day lives entailed.
I’d been gone for too long, first living abroad, then in the Midwest. Even with the technological advances in communication we have at our fingertips, I had lost touch with my family in important ways. I don’t ever feel the urge to pick up the phone and share the news about a new restaurant in Mankato- why would they care when they live 1,500 miles away? I haven’t IM’d about what happened in my classes or at work. It never seems that important. In fact, I’ve been terrible about calling for anything other than the ‘big events’ in life: birthdays, holidays, congratulations on a new job, and the like. But I came to realize that it is those small, seemingly insignificant details about life that coalesce into really knowing an understanding your family.
Wine and a hot tub can do wonderful things to bring people back together. Thanksgiving night, we stewed until we couldn’t take the heat anymore and had started to prune. We didn’t talk about anything groundbreaking, but the light banter we shared started to fill the gaps that had formed in our relationships. I find it a bit ironic that I know how important it is to immerse yourself in another culture before you can really begin to understand the people, but I never applied the same logic to my own family. Fortunately, this holiday brought us back together, showed me what I’ve been missing out on, and gave me an opportunity to get back in touch with the people I love the most.
No matter where home is, or what form it takes, family is family. And sometimes, the best vacations require the shortest flights.
*I felt that sharing this story, coming back to where I started, was a great way to end this phase of my blog. I am going on a bit of a sabbatical, taking time off from writing while I’m in Nicaragua. After I return, I will continue to post, though infrequently. To my long-time readers, I would like to thank you for reading my work and commenting on those things that grabbed your attention. To those who are newly interested in these pages, I hope you take the time to read my archived posts, and that you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. And don’t forget to check in for future posts!
