People who love travel say that travel opens up your mind, that it shows you things you hadn’t seen before, conclusions you hadn’t reached, customs you hadn’t imagined. That it shows you the world is bigger than yourself.
It does. It does all these things and more. It made a Nebraska girl learn some Japanese Kanji, and a picky eater put sashimi right up by French fries on his list.
But I think that if there’s anything that shows you your true size, it is coming back home.
And here we are now, coming back home. Hiking, playing, eating living. Hawaii’s hiking especially is hard to recover from, but we’re trying. Trying to remember the things we used to do, the kinds of places we used to hike. So we’re finding our way back to moss covered ponds, to great bushes of cattails, to hungry geese nibbling at moss.
We’re finding our way back, but the boys are discovering for the first time, which means that we are little bit too. It’s one of the joys of watching children, after all, to learn again the things you thought you knew before, and since we are learning it again as well, we get the joy of seeing weeping willows three times, the very first time we saw them, now again when we remember, and also when the boys marvel at their large drooping branches.
The fluff on the cattails drifts off and the moss lies heavy on the water and the newness of being back here again shines off the boys faces and shrieks in the once familiar calls of the birds, and it grows as the spring grows, the awareness unfurls with the budding branches. And the boys ask about the wind, the chill north wind even at the end of April and watch carefully for the tadpoles in the ponds and wonder at the sounds of the geese passing overhead, back up north as the sun slips behind the horizon for fewer hours every night.
And we are starting to remember. Annie Dillard wrote, “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live”, and so we are remembering how to live here again, and we realize we still know the calls of specific birds and the soft curl of bright spring leaves, and how we have keep moving to keep the wind’s chill off. But knowing things are not the same as living them again; we knew all these things but our bodies are re-learning how to live them.
We were grateful for the timing before, for not transitioning back to the four seasons in fall, when we would go straight from Hawaii into a long, dark winter, but it seems especially fitting now, as we walk these Illinois trails for the first times again as the flowers open and the birds chatter while they make their nests, and as we look for the next place we will go and be and make our home.
So we’re taking this to remember who we used to be, and to work it back in with what we have learned now. We remember that nothing stays the same, not us, not this land, and learning that every time we come again to something, whether new or old, whether we’ve seen it two times or two hundred, each time the place is different, and we are different.
And I’ve found that this life we’ve lived of moving around and coming back again, of constant overlapping circles, has been good for me, and good for us. It’s easy to think that life doesn’t move on without me; it does. It’s easy to forget that things change when I’m not around; they do. And it means I’ve learned to come back to every place, and every person, with some openness, with fewer expectations. My experience with someone is not the whole of that person. My learning of one place is not the whole of one place. And when we get to come back, we see that. We see the changes, the things that have lasted and the things that haven’t. None of them are dependent on us; not one. Nothing has waited.
So we come home again to a world that has moved on, and we remember. And learn again the things we need to know for each place, like: there is no really comfortable place, if by comfortable you mean the same. There are always places where we return, but they are never the same places. There are always the people to welcome us, but never quite the same people.
So we come again, we stop, we look around, we learn again. And find a place for ourselves again, because our place has closed up again, always, each time, in the manner that the world does, in the way that nothing empty is left open and in the way that no place filled with living people ever stays the same.
We listen, we learn. And we stop for the new years’ cattails and listen to the frogs; different frogs singing their same songs.
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