Finding Home: Retrospect and Prospect

From my plane window the trees crowded in on each other like memories in old haunts. This would be the first time in almost a decade that I would drive these North Carolina streets and breathe this muggy air. Much has changed. I have changed.

Every place we love, and even those we don’t, holds memories like bubbles trapped in sea grass. Some rise to the surface and disappear forever, while others wait. We move on, but the memories stay, holding space for our past should we ever return. Remembrances throng around me here, reawakened. They ambush me with longing.

Street names, restaurants and stores, park swings and trees—taller now—mysteriously open to worlds I had forgotten. They say the stronger the emotion, the stronger the memory. Is that why my throat is choked and tears pool unbidden?

Those were happy years, full of diapers and fingernail clippings, homemade cookies and celery sticks, neighborhood games of kickball, school buses and permission slips and piles of picture books. My tears are not regret, but knowing. I couldn’t see ahead then, though sometimes I wanted just a glimpse. Now I have more than a glimpse, and the truth is much better and much harder than I knew. This tightness in my chest is compassion for my younger self, who will have hard roads to walk and who is worried unnecessarily about things that will turn out just fine.

With children the minutes seem like hours and the years fly by. I can still hear the lilt of my toddler’s voice asking to “go wee” on the neighbor’s backyard swing; now his eyes are nearly level with mine. He and the trees never stopped growing. That early entrance to kindergarten we fought for makes this the last year of high school for his older sister. How time flies! And as for the oldest? I can hear her planning her next elaborate birthday. Ten feels so recent, though twenty has passed.

In these day-long years some dreams have turned sour while others are much sweeter than I dared hope.

Every parent you know carries heartaches hidden from public view, the hardness that won’t receive love, the seeds planted that never bloomed, and the weeds that choked them. It goes both ways, I’m sure, for I am a daughter, too. I’ve reaped the bitter fruit of trees I did not plant and felt the frustration of generational differences.

What would I tell that younger me—that young mother in Charlotte with her future ahead of her?

I’d tell her doors will open. Just learn what you need to while you can. Be faithful with little.

I’d tell her she chose well. Attempting seminary while bearing children was a risk, but it was worth every naptime spent researching and every weekend spent reading. All those seeds sown would bear abundant fruit.

I’d tell her she’s not in charge of her children and their choices and that she can’t spare them heartache. Her job is simply to love well.

I’d tell her most of all that Jesus is everything and that God will be faithful. I’d say the path watered with tears leads to sweetness and light. Why should we fear the sorrow when it wraps so many precious gifts?

As my plane lifted off a week later the chapter closed again, but this time gilded with recollections, like aged wine. We flew westward three time zones, over mountains and plains, deserts and canyons, toward the new place I call home.

On our descent I gazed over smoggy Los Angeles, crammed with houses and businesses, but empty of trees and, more poignantly, empty of memories. Like a book with blank pages, those streets meant nothing to me. I could not feel their pulse. They held nothing of my heart.

Not yet, anyway.

It won’t always be like this. In ten or twenty years the descent into LAX will grip my chest and catch in my throat. Faces and stories will crowd the smoggy air with meaning. I trust it will be so.

Right now it doesn’t happen—that homey feeling—until I’m a mile from home. My world is small here, traversed on sandaled foot—home to work and back, home to church and back, home to park and back. The memories here are thin, like a winter sunset lacking warmth. It feels right to be here, but the stories are too young to cherish, too new to offer substance. If we left now we'd soon forget.

What would future me want me to know today?

I think she’d tell me to cling to Jesus, who’s been with me in every zip code I’ve called mine. He’s the constant and the depth I’m longing for.

She’d say to treasure old friendships and make time to nurture new ones, so the years ahead will hold twice the celebration and half the despair.

And I expect she’d say to savor this beautiful life. After all, the story is only partly written. The sorrows will give way to joy in the end (perhaps sooner?). When some is lost, not all is lost, and what seems the worst is probably not.

I already know well that what seems permanent may not be, and what feels tenuous may prove to endure. So as the strong California sun drops behind palm trees in the evening sky, I am thankful. However fragile it is, I am home.