Coming Home – Annika’s Family
The overgrown lilac and salvia bush made our usual side entrance to the house feel more like a return to Sleeping Beauty’s castle than the home we left a year before. We opened the door, into the collective space of our past, ready to kiss it back to life. We dispersed in different directions. I was in a stupor and struck by the space, the sheer square footage. Recently vacated by renters, the house had been rearranged and was absent of the jetsam and flotsam of our previous lives. It felt as generic as a furniture catalog. There were no dogs or rabbits; no half-finished art projects or dishes drying. Was this really home?
Then I walked around the yard and saw the cherry tree full of perfectly ripe cherries—for the first time since it was planted three years before—and realized that the pie must be made today. Time sows its constraints, and cherries will not wait long. The mental to-do list had started. I turned to Will, and he said, “Let’s go. Let’s just not unpack the car and just keep going.” We looked at each other and laughed. And cried. Holding hands outside of our house, next to the electricity and gas meters, we realized that we were choosing to land, choosing to find meaning in one fixed place on the planet and plant our roots like the cherry tree. At least for a year, we could give it a year.
The happiest part of coming home for me was putting things in drawers. It’s astounding how much pleasure that gave me: to open a drawer, arrange my things inside, run my hand along the folded clothes, and then close the drawer. No longer was I digging through duffels, fumbling with zippers, or finding that something had leaked. A close second-best thing was my friends: although Will and I grew as a couple and deeply enjoyed each other’s company, there were some topics better discussed with friends. When I would talk with him about the complex set of emotions in letting my hair grow gray, he tried in earnest to find the discussion meaningful for the twenty-seventh time. And would often ask, “Did I do okay?” And yes, he did, but there’s something so much better about that conversation with other women in their forties. There is just so much to talk about with gray hair. And it is so yummy to have female conversations in real time with my beloved friends.
Back to the hum of the utility boxes and the urgency of the cherries, we grieved the loss of our family as a distinct unit. Our thirteen-year-old couldn’t wait to put the air in her tires before biking over to visit a friend. She literally rode off on a flat back tire as I stood in the driveway to watch her go, feeling enormous gratitude for our year and watching it end just like that. Poof. It’s healthy for kids to go their own way, and yet I would miss our shared time, our yearlong team build.
I feared that the best year of my life was waving at me from the rearview window. How could anything top the year of wonder, laughter, the expanse of time without hurry, and a year when family was the priority? Not like a kitchen-plaque motto or life-coaching exercise, but an in-your-face, 24-7 reality? This was my thought as I stood by the cherry tree: I will miss them.
In my first month, I started filling up my calendar in the way I used to. I quickly had three places to be in different parts of town at the same moment: a class picnic at one school, a class picnic at the other, and a Suzuki Strings group class three miles away from either one. My throat felt tight, my guilt at having to tell someone that I couldn’t do it all made me sweaty. But how was this possible? How could I be in three places at the same time? And the answer was: I couldn’t. The old me couldn’t see this impossibility. The new me said, Well, that’s unhealthy.
The new me also messed up my scheduling. A lot. I was like a pink Cadillac with loose shocks and a broken fuel injection trying to merge onto the Autobahn. To complicate matters, my phone somehow thought I was still in the time zone of the Aegean Islands (and mentally I probably was), but somehow I knew that we were probably not meeting with the tax adviser at 3:00 a.m., which left me always second-guessing the veracity of my schedule. I was simply out of practice in looking at my phone. As the muscle memory began to kick in, I tried to be mindful of when I truly needed to be accessible and when time and its dictates could be more mysterious and muffled. I vowed to not simply acclimatize to the way I used to be, to remember that my phone was not an appendage. I vowed to edit the family’s activities and not feel the guilt. I vowed to remember that time could be expansive and did not hold me captive.
