I feel at home in the world, and I feel like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. I cannot push a thumbtack in a map and say, “There. That is where I’m from.” There is nothing to grab onto, no anchor. A vagabond life provides stopgaps but no permanence. Our friends who have traveled the world before us suggested we keep our house during our voyage; we decided instead to sell. I think of them now and wonder if their wisdom would have insulated me from my sense of free-falling.
Because there is no escape hatch for dwelling on the possibility of home, I wonder if instead I have been given the gift of noticing. Are my senses enhanced, sharpened? Have I honed my discerning spirit, learned to take keen note of the differences in how prices are labeled in markets, how beer tastes on different continents? I feel as though I can smell the exhaust from a car in New Zealand, how it mingles with air molecules in a different formation than in Hong Kong. The Thai speak an octave higher than anyone else I’ve yet encountered. Australians elongate the cadence of their e’s. Finn’s left eyebrow arches higher than his right when he’s surprised. The southern Chinese have a different accent to their Mandarin than their northern counterparts, though I couldn’t pinpoint specifics. I just know they do.
Poet Mary Oliver writes, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”1 Perhaps I have been given this as a work assignment on our travels.
“Tea?” asks Adriel. “Or beer? We have both. Have you tried Beez Neez? It’s wonderful.”
Ryan and Adriel are staying with us through the New Year, which means traipsing our five kids to the fireworks display over Sydney Harbor. They know of a good spot, where we will fight crowds, yes, but where we can spread out a picnic blanket or two. Several days ago, they took us to Sydney proper, where Reed splashed in the hot summer waves of Manly Beach for his late December birthday, and where we took a ferryboat down the harbor and witnessed the sun set fire to the top of the Sydney Opera House. It was a relief, a lightness, to sightsee with locals. Sydney is pleasurable, but she is not easy to navigate.
The morning of December 31, a friend of Adriel’s calls from our anticipated spot for the evening festivities.
“She got there by ten this morning, and it’s already filled to the gills,” Adriel whispers with her hand over the phone. “She’s saving us a few feet of space, but she says we need to be there by three so she can take a break.”
My eyes widen; my heart heaves with the thought of five children parked on a blanket for nine hours until fireworks.
“Still want to?” she asks. I make a face. I mentally replay the Internet video we watched yesterday of last year’s harbor fireworks display and debate the merits of wedging the lot of us in three square feet and no bathrooms.
Tonight—the nine of our bodies bedecked with pajamas and glow sticks—we fire up the backyard grill and queue eighties music from our laptops. We cavort on the trampoline and laugh as our neon-glowing heads of pink, blue, and yellow swirl and jostle up and down. The kids giggle, and I bathe in the sound. I sing along loudly to songs from my childhood. We watch the display of fireworks from the comfort of the McAlarys’ couch, and we fall asleep at a reasonable hour.
There was a global phenomenon an arm’s reach away, and we chose instead to soak in the ordinariness of home, be it a temporary one. Tonight, I log in a day’s work of paying attention.
A new year has arrived, and we are squarely in the suburbs to welcome it.
Australia is didgeridoos and dingoes, deadly rain forest weeds and millions of endemic creatures. It is also Santa at the mall and commonplace lawn grass. It, along with New Zealand, is so distant from my native country and my daily awareness that it’s easy to forget about this corner of the world. They welcome the day first here, before the rest of us on the planet. They have given us refrigeration, Wi-Fi, and bungee jumping. Australia’s citizens primarily speak English, yet they christen places with names like Bong Bong, Boing Boing, Bungle Bungles, Bubble Bubble, Humpty Doo, Headbutts, Tittybong, and Nowhere Else. New Zealand sheep outnumber people six to one and adorn the rest of us with merino wool. Yet the people remind me of Texas, my birthplace—neighborly, proud of their heritage, salt of the earth. They are familiar faces, at home nine thousand miles away from my own.
The citizens of this corner of the world cherish their land. They love their waters. They cultivate both well, carve lightly into the topography, and delight in the natural world’s pleasures with aplomb. Representatives of the human race are sparse. Trees that once played with dinosaurs still run wild. Wildflowers frolic in abandon with livestock. People plow the dark soil and paint with earth’s rocks.
Asia forces me into the unknown; Australia and New Zealand give me the gift of retreat. Asia taps my Americanness on the shoulder and plays a new song with a novel beat, asks me for a dance. Australia hands me a glass of wine and invites me to take a load off in the chair on the back deck. My wayfaring half has been resurrected, yet my other half, the homebody, still exists among night market stalls and grass tucked at the base of the Southern Alps.
My full body, I realize, was always in my Oregon neighborhood, reading stories on the couch to my kids about faraway lands. I savor mango sticky rice from dubious food stalls in Chiang Mai, and I relish grilled cheese and tomato soup on my dining room table. Our last ordinary days in Australia whisper to me a secret: going into the unknown means returning to the known is a bewitching sweetness. Adventure doesn’t always require a sturdy backpack.
We feed chickens; we make soup; we go to the movies. We catch up on work and school. We spot kangaroos crossing the neighborhood road as deer do in Texas. We pay attention for two more weeks. And then, we fold our laundry, repack our bags, and replenish our deodorant stash. It is time to reengage with the planet in a new year.
Summertime Christmastide
Snows of seasonal cotton lie dormant till wind swirls its spell
Kisses ankles of children with ready walking sticks,
Tufts flit down, down, downward again.
Juvenile milky puffs emancipate from its mother branch,
Maypole-dancing down the bole.
December tides of late spring hearken new birth.
Leaves raise hands as celebrants of new life,
A nativity brought for all.
It is summer. Glad tidings to all.
INTERMISSION
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C. S. Lewis
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SRI LANKA