Home
Have you noticed how everything good in the past is saturated with more color, sharper smells, more wondrous sounds, like a forest after rain? Memories seem to glow with extra color. Having glowing memories like this, instead of ones that make me dive under my bed, makes me terribly lucky, and I am grateful.
Tonight, a person wrote to me and in passing mentioned, "I was in Nairobi once. . ." and suddenly out of the grey, chilly, northwest night a voice breathed, I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. . . .After Meryl Streep's accent (embodying the voice of Karen Blixen) died away, I heard my own voice like an echo: I lived there once, and at the end of my road there was a jacaranda tree, and when it rained, purple trumpet-shaped blossoms scattered the red earth. . . .
And suddenly I am transported from this grey rain to expansive night skies, when the stars scattered like a road across the black expanse, and the smell of the earth rose full and sweet after the rain pearled on the waxy leaves of the coffee bushes by our school. I remember the sweep of tawny savannah, dotted with olive-green acacia trees, and low blue mountains that rose on the horizon, and the way the sun warmed you all the way through without making you weary.
Now. In the midst of this little memory journey, my eight-year old daughter walks by the purring wood stove, her hands full of tiny plastic shopkins, and my wee dog watches her carefully from his blue bed and behind me, my fourteen-year old studies World History with her earbuds hanging from her ears. . .and in the kitchen my husband of almost twenty years sketches with charcoal next to my middle daughter.
I am a mother, yes, and a wife and a writer living in a split-level house above the Puget Sound. But I am also a middle daughter and once I lived with my sister and brother and parents in Nairobi, Kenya. We had two little white dogs. At night I'd roller skate across our cobblestones and the night guards would sit at the gates of our compound and laugh. During Diwali, we heard the neighbors settling off firecrackers and laughing late into the night, and sometimes on hot afternoons we smelled our Nigerian neighbors drying fish on their roof.
Funny how my mind bends to these things all of a sudden. I never speak of Nairobi much anymore and I seldom think about it. I've released it into the past with a feeling of great gratitude coupled with a strong tinge of discomfort, knowing that I was a foreigner there and I can never claim Kenya as "home" no matter how nostalgic it makes me feel.
In her beautiful memoir, Karen Blixen writes:
Karen Blixen has an entire affluent neighborhood southwest of Nairobi named after her, so yes, her song endures. What I react to in Karen Blixen, besides the lyricism of her writing, is her ache for a place that was never truly or rightfully hers. The tension crops up for me right away: being white and privileged in a country that is not mine, growing up in an international community that was a mixed bag of good intentions, truly wonderful work, and outright racism. There are a few shining models of people who realized that they were guests and showed me what listening, friendship, respect, and a humble attitude of learning and collaboration really meant. But then there were others, and I'm embarrassed to be lumped in with them, even as I realize such traces must be present in me, too.
Colonialism and cultural appropriation aside, I would never dream of presuming to leave any large footprint behind me; indeed, I prefer to pass through places, welcoming as much as I can into myself, giving as much as I can in return. And that give-and-take is never equal of course--I receive much more than I ever leave behind, and realizing that makes me deeply grateful.
I am past feeling as though I must lay claim on one place as "Home." But sometimes, in my dreams when settings and people from different pasts cross threads, confusing space and time, I wake with the feeling that I am still looking for Home. I will never find it in the past, but I must keep accepting here, now, as Home. This is a helpful philosophy and one that's allowed me to be flexible. It leaves little space for nostalgia; it makes one a bad correspondent and a still worse telephone-person; it makes people like my husband, who can point to Home on a map, a bit baffled and a bit sad. Don't you understand? My life has chapters, each part of my narrative but each almost completely separate from the other but for themes and a few people who keep weaving their threads into my web, reminding me that all is connected. And that's enough. That feeling of fullness, of connectedness, undergirds Home now, and makes it solid, good, real as this table I'm writing on, real as the touch of my daughter as she brushes by me on the way to our kitchen.
But tonight I have having trouble disconnecting my mind and spirit--suddenly pliable and tender after a passing comment in one email--from a place that was once entirely Home. Bright pink bougainvillea rambles up our hedge in the our garden where my mother and I used to have tea after school. Garbage piles cook in the afternoon sun as we snag big black flies for my brother's chameleon. I pluck a hibiscus flower the color of Orangina from the bushes behind our townhouse. Its petals, dotted with black ants, shrivel as soon as soon as I step indoors and put it into water.
Now. I really must stop--the present presses in. Beatrix wants to play a game. I give myself fully back to this moment, to Home.
Okay, okay. Ndiyo, yes, I'm listening.
And suddenly I am transported from this grey rain to expansive night skies, when the stars scattered like a road across the black expanse, and the smell of the earth rose full and sweet after the rain pearled on the waxy leaves of the coffee bushes by our school. I remember the sweep of tawny savannah, dotted with olive-green acacia trees, and low blue mountains that rose on the horizon, and the way the sun warmed you all the way through without making you weary.
Now. In the midst of this little memory journey, my eight-year old daughter walks by the purring wood stove, her hands full of tiny plastic shopkins, and my wee dog watches her carefully from his blue bed and behind me, my fourteen-year old studies World History with her earbuds hanging from her ears. . .and in the kitchen my husband of almost twenty years sketches with charcoal next to my middle daughter.
I am a mother, yes, and a wife and a writer living in a split-level house above the Puget Sound. But I am also a middle daughter and once I lived with my sister and brother and parents in Nairobi, Kenya. We had two little white dogs. At night I'd roller skate across our cobblestones and the night guards would sit at the gates of our compound and laugh. During Diwali, we heard the neighbors settling off firecrackers and laughing late into the night, and sometimes on hot afternoons we smelled our Nigerian neighbors drying fish on their roof.
Funny how my mind bends to these things all of a sudden. I never speak of Nairobi much anymore and I seldom think about it. I've released it into the past with a feeling of great gratitude coupled with a strong tinge of discomfort, knowing that I was a foreigner there and I can never claim Kenya as "home" no matter how nostalgic it makes me feel.
In her beautiful memoir, Karen Blixen writes:
“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”
Karen Blixen has an entire affluent neighborhood southwest of Nairobi named after her, so yes, her song endures. What I react to in Karen Blixen, besides the lyricism of her writing, is her ache for a place that was never truly or rightfully hers. The tension crops up for me right away: being white and privileged in a country that is not mine, growing up in an international community that was a mixed bag of good intentions, truly wonderful work, and outright racism. There are a few shining models of people who realized that they were guests and showed me what listening, friendship, respect, and a humble attitude of learning and collaboration really meant. But then there were others, and I'm embarrassed to be lumped in with them, even as I realize such traces must be present in me, too.
Colonialism and cultural appropriation aside, I would never dream of presuming to leave any large footprint behind me; indeed, I prefer to pass through places, welcoming as much as I can into myself, giving as much as I can in return. And that give-and-take is never equal of course--I receive much more than I ever leave behind, and realizing that makes me deeply grateful.
I am past feeling as though I must lay claim on one place as "Home." But sometimes, in my dreams when settings and people from different pasts cross threads, confusing space and time, I wake with the feeling that I am still looking for Home. I will never find it in the past, but I must keep accepting here, now, as Home. This is a helpful philosophy and one that's allowed me to be flexible. It leaves little space for nostalgia; it makes one a bad correspondent and a still worse telephone-person; it makes people like my husband, who can point to Home on a map, a bit baffled and a bit sad. Don't you understand? My life has chapters, each part of my narrative but each almost completely separate from the other but for themes and a few people who keep weaving their threads into my web, reminding me that all is connected. And that's enough. That feeling of fullness, of connectedness, undergirds Home now, and makes it solid, good, real as this table I'm writing on, real as the touch of my daughter as she brushes by me on the way to our kitchen.
But tonight I have having trouble disconnecting my mind and spirit--suddenly pliable and tender after a passing comment in one email--from a place that was once entirely Home. Bright pink bougainvillea rambles up our hedge in the our garden where my mother and I used to have tea after school. Garbage piles cook in the afternoon sun as we snag big black flies for my brother's chameleon. I pluck a hibiscus flower the color of Orangina from the bushes behind our townhouse. Its petals, dotted with black ants, shrivel as soon as soon as I step indoors and put it into water.
Now. I really must stop--the present presses in. Beatrix wants to play a game. I give myself fully back to this moment, to Home.
Okay, okay. Ndiyo, yes, I'm listening.
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