The Tug of Home

            As for the Rat, he was walking a little way ahead, as his habit was, his shoulders humped, his eyes fixed on the straight grey road in front of him; so he did not notice poor Mole when suddenly the summons reached him, and took him like an electric shock.

            We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word ‘smell,’ for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.

            Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!

—from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Daniel and I had been reading The Wind and the Willows aloud to each other. It was my turn to read when Home’s invisible hands started tugging at Mole. I stuttered through the passage, paused a heavy while, and had to back-track to read it again. And again. And highlight it some more. (If this annoyed my listener, he didn’t betray such sentiments). I rolled these words along my tongue and felt my ears becoming pointier, hands becoming paws, face becoming fuzzier—don’t worry for me; this is all figurative—my solidarity with Mole was materializing with great speed.

You can’t know how strong Home’s pull is, how weighty its reasons, how peculiar its scent, until you must leave it. And perhaps even leave it far enough behind that you can’t go back in a single afternoon, or even in a full day’s flight.

I’ve always been a homebody. Strange words coming from the one who makes a habit of going to Africa for long stretches of time. My elementary school crew (Elizabeth, Megan, Deidre, and I) were close; and we planned as many sleepovers as our parents would allow us—all of which were full of Backstreet Boys music video marathons, dance choreography, Truth or Dare, Nintendo, prank phone calls, the works. But there were various times I employed “the trick.” Whether it was the enticing, homey lighting in the kitchen the moment the phone rang, or the hovering probability of a thunder storm enjoyed indoors with Rootbeer floats, or the laughter thundering from the living room—I’d make the game-time decision to cover the receiver, shake my head violently, and whisper Say no, to my mom at the sink. She seemed to relish fulfilling this task, as I was choosing her and the gang over my friends at that moment. I was choosing the kitchen table, a holy place in the Steadman household, where I would spend the evening talking her ear off as she flipped through Rini Rego’s weekly ads, planning our meals for the next two weeks, clipping coupons, making grocery lists. If you could only see the lighting of the room when she did these things. You’d want to stay home too.

One of my first “spiritual obstacles” you could say, began the morning my Sunday School teacher Darlene fleshed out the first commandment for us seedlings: God must be number one in a person’s life. It seems obvious and second nature now, but to a 9 year old, what could be worse? This lovely woman who didn’t know my family the way I knew my family, was telling me it was physically possible to love someone more than those four particular individuals I adored. And an invisible someone, at that. No way, Jose. Not happening, says little Danielle. I had sleepless, tearful, angry, prayerful nights for awhile. I imagined a staggered Olympics medalist platform, shifting like an escalator. Mom and Dad on Gold, 11-year-old Christine and 4-year-old Charlie sharing Silver, God on Bronze. How could it be otherwise? Let’s pretend a moment. Escalator shift. God on top, then parents, then siblings. How how how. No way, Jose. Shift back! What gives him that privilege? His bedroom isn’t even near mine.

I wanted to just ignore Darlene, pretend she never said it. But it seemed that everything else she said on Sundays seemed to orbit around that tiny important “must.” And I couldn’t ignore it, because I liked God. I fancied him pretty important—just not quite important enough to oust my favorite people in his favor. My young life depended on the pecking order I had created, and that sort of thing doesn’t change in a day.

After six months, a year, two years (this 3^rd grade struggle is nowhere documented), my tearful prayers shifted one night, as did my medalist platform. Smiling ear to ear in my bottom bunk, nearly giggling myself to sleep, I was relieved I had reached the place Darlene described—and doubly relieved to find this didn’t mean I had to love my family any less. It turned out he couldn’t even share the same platform—but needed his own and separate one, a bit to the left; his importance was an over-arching kind that somehow even infiltrated the other pedestals.

I often think back to this moment and ponder God’s cleverness. More than once I’ve asked him, So is this why that had to happen? Did you need me to choose you over them early, to make this decision easier today? Like when I felt the call to fulltime missions and spent years preparing, when I studied in Uganda, when I spent my college breaks and summers (times I craved home) serving at summer camps and cleaning up after hurricanes. Like when we came to Ethiopia for two years, boarding the plane during my sister’s eighth month of pregnancy.

As much as I fell in love with Waco during Daniel’s Baylor years—and as often as I beg Daniel to agree to settle down there, I know that my connection with the city and the people doesn’t matter nearly as much as the location: Waco is in Texas, and Texas is an 18-hour drive from home. No way, Jose. Even in America where there are still grocery stores and paved roads and cheese and people speaking English, I found ways to pine for home: I constantly wanted to have our parents over for dinner. The summer sun melted me, and I missed fall weather almost as much as I miss it now. And it was far enough away to even miss my brother’s high school graduation. Even though Texas can be described as a “whole nother country,” you can imagine how much further home seems from Africa. Ya’ll.

Five or so years ago was the first time one of our extended family (maternal side) permanently moved outside of a 25-minute radius from my parents’ house, moving to Tennessee (Duquettes, you can still come back). And it was earth-shattering when it happened; we moped around like Zombies in disbelief. When we let ourselves think about their coming departure, we just assumed they’d change their minds. They didn’t. As a kid, I used to think about growing up and moving down the street from my parents, never leaving Willoughby. Today I’m jealous that Christine is a 5-minute drive from them. Instead, I married an Indiana boy who will be a professor in a few years—and Willoughby isn’t exactly brimming with universities. The chances of our fulfilling my childhood dream are slim, and I hate being the official second Distler to leave the 25-minute radius. Y tu, Brute? That’s what my mind spits at me when I overdramatize it.

Daniel is a homebody too. When we’re away from our roots, at least we can be homebodies together. Enter soundtrack, if you own the tune (Will Smith’s cover of Just the Two of Us). The crux of our entertainment is in the home, and with each other—after work, we rarely leave our house, and the best days are Sundays when we don’t leave at all. Scrabble and reading and podcasts and Chess and baseball catch and building castles in the sky. I smile back to our first days in Adwa, when we were the only volunteers (now there are 7 of us), and we knew no one. Most people don’t romanticize about being friendless (shame on me). But having nowhere to go and no obligations can be lovely for a homebody: it ensures indefinite at-home-ness. And homes—physical shelters—become even more tangibly crucial in a place where the moment you step outside your gate you have to steady your eyes to the ground and ignore every hello from a male, every “Hey Sugar,” “Come here, Sweet,” and “Do you love me?” Just this week a man in his forties, dressed in a nice suit, followed me down the mainroad, yelling “**** you! **** you!”—what many consider the worst word in the book. Why? Because I shook my head at this stranger when he said, “Anti! (You girl) Come here.” Homebody takes on a new definition here, with new reasons. Outside that gate, anything goes.

My fellow homebody misses his family too. Save that one element, I think Daniel could remain in Adwa indefinitely (perhaps if the town administration would create a more impressive public library, and begin airing ESPN). It’s me who turns my homebody-ness into an overarching speech bubble that contains too much.

For me, yes, home is the Steadmans and the Distlers and the Luttrulls. Home is those three separate kitchens, living rooms, and everything that goes on there. But it’s also autumn briskness, and night breezes particular to Willoughby, singing along to the car radio, Lake Erie and libraries, the English language, art museums and coffee shops (don’t tell Ethiopia I miss American coffee), college campuses and their trees, functional banks and police departments, the drive to my grandparents’ house in my bathing suit, the smell of citronella torches around my parents’ porch, Matter Park, softball fields and hiking trails, campsites and barbecues, Communion and sanitation and friends. Home has that scent of familiarity and comfort that exists nowhere else. And it’s a scent I need in my nostrils on a constant basis, or I am dissatisfied. Why is it that nowhere else can compare to home? There’s nothing the “somewhere else” can do about it—it’s just the fact that it isn’t home. Because the main thing home has going for it is that it is.

I imagine that, as mankind, we always want to be somewhere we’re not. When we leave here, I may grumble at the boredom of driving to work. This week I walked to school on a Thursday, and had to weave around two slow camels on the sidewalk. On the next day’s walk I met a newborn goat who had just done a somersault and was trying to muster enough leg-strength to stand. On yesterday’s walk, I passed 15 young boys turning a heap of future telephone poles into their very own teeter-totter. I already know I will someday romanticize and miss these Adwan common occurrences, maybe even wish I was back here. But if it is true that we always want to be somewhere we’re not, and if A=foreign place, and B=home, then B > A every time. Regardless of where we may be, B always always holds the pull far stronger than A.

As we walked back from church one night here, I saw an older woman stooping on her haunches, outside her door. There was light and activity within her house, and without there was a breeze and beautiful mess of stars. My mind jumped to an American family on their porch on a summer night. Our equivalent to her stooping. And I thought, “Is she happy here? Were she on a porch in America, would she be dreaming of this doorstep instead?” And I think she would.

And now (home) was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

 

 Our countdown chain til June 19, when we board a plane to D.C., to Cleveland. Three weeks at our homes! (It is too long to fit in the photo frame, and wraps around in places unseen.)

*Please note the Peace Corps Challenge deadline is only 9 days away. Come on, we double dog dared you!*