Even so, my innards ache for home. My heart has a magnetic pull toward an earthly center, a place of permanence. I want passport stamps, so long as I have a drawer to keep that passport in at the end of a trip. Giving up a home this year felt like swinging on a netless trapeze. The kids are eager for a home, to be in their own beds with blankets and stuffed animals. Kyle is eager to dust off his tools and get back to woodworking. I pine for my books, splayed on a shelf instead of an e-reader. My soul feels pulled in two directions: toward home, and toward another unknown road in another town.
God, why do I have both wanderlust and a yearning for home? I step deeper, closer to the center. This labyrinthine path, a circular back-and-forth toward a central ebenezer, resembles our family’s year. It zigzags, rambles out farther then returns closer, takes the long road to its destination. The rock stays unchanged. No matter how many times I’d try to rewalk this path, I’ll wind up at the same rock.
Wanderlust and my longing for home are birthed from the same place: a desire to find the ultimate spot this side of heaven. When I stir soup at my stove, I drift to a distant island. When I’m on the road with my backpack, my heart wanders back to my couch, my favorite coffee cup. My equal pull between both are fueled by my hardwired desire for heaven on earth. And I know I’ll never find it.
I stop at the labyrinth center, and I think of the stanza to one of my favorite poems, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. . . .
I’ve seen an earth crammed with heaven. Hints of its existence are dropped all over the place, even in the birthplace of Hitler. If I could see to the fathoms beneath the surface, I’d see the secret behind all these common bushes, the roots of Thai banana trees and the avocado trees of Uganda. They’d wink at me, sharing their secret and nodding in affirmation at my bare feet. I press my naked toes into the labyrinth’s gravel path.
I love finding one more new place to explore, I love showing it to my kids, and I love wandering those new streets with Kyle. But unless the flickering bushes compel me to remove my shoes, traveling the world will never satisfy. Neither will the daily liturgy of normal life back home. The laundry folding and bill paying would do me in. I’d resign myself to plucking blackberries.
The way to reconcile my wanderlust with life back home is to lean in to the tension, to extol life’s haunting inability to ever fully satisfy. Life’s full of paradoxes, after all. Why shouldn’t this be one more of them?
21
ENGLAND
We spend a week in Normandy and Paris, showing my in-laws my second-favorite European city and touching the sacred sands of Omaha Beach. Daily gelatos are replaced by daily crêpes. We climb the steps up the Eiffel Tower, devour a box of macarons from Lauderée on the Champs-élysées, and wander the Pompidou and Louvre. I queue at Shakespeare and Company while the family sips cappuccinos and sodas in a crowded café across the street from Notre Dame, and we take a family selfie underneath the Arc de Triomphe. We pack all of Paris into a few short days, then hop on a puddle-jumper to my first-favorite European city.
I’ve been to London at least five times before, but it’s been a while, and the kids have never been. Kyle’s only been once, when we were engaged, and it was such a short jaunt and we were so poor, we did almost nothing. I am eager to show my favorite people my favorite city.
Ending in London isn’t an accident. Except for Australia, now more than ten thousand miles away, its culture is most similar to our own. There are differences, of course, but the disparities between the United States and Britain, and the United States and, say, China? There’s no comparison.
Our primary agenda is togetherness. We walk by Big Ben, the London Eye, the Globe Theatre, the Tower Bridge, and they form the backdrop for family chats about what life will soon look like. We sigh with relief at the lack of a language barrier, and we make heavy use of the cleanest metro system in the world. I also want to find a souvenir of my own.
We’ve been collecting art this year, rolling up prints and tea towels in a travel tube, grateful for lightweight mobility. I’d eye a ceramic tea set in Sri Lanka or a gumwood bench in Australia, yet our lengthy backpack living couldn’t justify them. But London is our last stop. I want to find something.
I reckon I’ll find what I’m looking for on Portobello Road in one of London’s most iconic markets. It’s in Notting Hill, one of my favorite areas. Every Saturday, the street and surrounding alleys of Notting Hill fill with throngs of booths offering antiques, books, vintage clothing, and records, with even more hordes of people eager to browse and buy. It’s a collector’s dream, it’s a Highly Sensitive Person’s nightmare, and if you want something British besides a Union Jack magnet or snow globe, it’s worth the overwhelm.
All morning, we skirt the alleys and main street, weave through crowds, and stop at booths to eye old-fashioned cameras, teacups honoring the queen’s jubilee, and forty-year-old double-decker bus toys. I drool over old copies of Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh, but nothing is priced well enough for my few precious pounds, so by lunch, I resign myself to fish and chips. From Notting Hill, we head toward the Tube station, and on the way, I see precisely what I want. It’s nothing special—a silver pitcher, part of a long-gone tea set, now orphaned and priced to move. Eight inches tall, tarnished, and boxy shaped with a flip-top lid, it’s not worth much to anyone. But I want it. It could be used for tea, or it could house flowers as a vase. Probably, though, it’ll sit on top of a stack of books, high on my bookshelf, as a reminder of our year around the world. It is lovely.
Engraved on the front, in plain-set typography, are the words Rosebery Felixstowe. I have no idea what this means, so I ask the booth’s vendor, who’s busy making change for other buyers.
“No idea, love. It’s old and missing its set, so it’s hard to say. But it’s yours for ten pounds,” he says. He returns to haggling a price on a set of teaspoons. I toss the man a ten-pound note, wave thanks, and tuck my new silver pitcher into my backpack.
When we return to our flat I search for Rosebery Felixstowe on the Internet, and I discover that Rosebery is a short neighborhood street in the seaside town of Felixstowe, not far from Ipswich. I’ve never been there, I have to find its whereabouts on a map, and until now, I’ve had little interest in visiting that part of England.