This is why we stunned ourselves by moving back to Austin.
On our trip around the world, Kyle and I kept the question of home in the backs of our minds and the forefront of our conversations. When a locale proved itself pleasing enough, we’d ask each other—Could we move here? Could this be home? If nowhere pulled strong enough, our default was a return to central Oregon. That was our assumption, in fact, until the last month of our journey.
In Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany, Kyle and I went on that date to that pub, and along with talking about the kids and their year of nonstop travel, we talked about home. I don’t remember who brought it up first, but we shocked ourselves with a mutual admittance that of all the places in the world, we thought Austin might be calling us back. Late that night, we listened to drunk Germans sing in the background and we stared at lights reflecting over an inky-black Bodensee while we brainstormed what a return to Texas would look like.
Kyle said, “I don’t know why, but no matter where we are in the world, Austin has this magnetic pull. It’s like we’re supposed to be there.”
A month later, we got rid of another handful of our belongings waiting for us in a central Oregon storage unit, packed the rest in a truck, and signed a rental agreement in the north Austin suburbs.
We don’t know how long we’ll be here. We’re not Benedictine monks, and twenty-first-century life is what it is. But as our kids get older, we’re surprising ourselves with our unassuming, quiet draw to stability.
Austin’s traffic has only gotten worse, and all the queso in the world doesn’t quell my hatred for the refracting heat waves in the steaming summer air. Turns out, we didn’t move here for convenience, culture, or our taste buds. We moved here because of people. There were just enough old friends and just enough family to pull us back here, and together with the Anglican church we now attend with ardor (we’ve even been confirmed as official Anglicans), we’ve unearthed what we found in a sliver of a fraction in Thailand, Australia, and France: community.
This isn’t to say we didn’t make friends in Oregon. We managed to meet lovely people that we still enjoy visiting when we’re in the Pacific Northwest, and we hope to know them for a long time. We have family who live several hours’ drive away from our former central Oregon home, and we miss living in closer proximity to them too. But for whatever reason, it never became home. We loved living there, but our souls remained restless.
Author Terry Pratchett wrote, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” This comforts me, here in Texas.
We will always travel. In fact, we’ve got more trips on the horizon, both scribbled on calendar squares and in daydreams for the kids’ teenage years. Our move to Texas was on the condition that we’d spend a sizable chunk of our summer months in Oregon, as much as we could help it.
Wanderlust is never truly quenched—as C. S. Lewis famously penned, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
The more I travel, the more I’m at peace with the unslakable satisfaction of wanderlust. Its very nature exists on the promise of something better around the bend, and the stamps in my passport have proved to me my heart will always yearn for something better. And better. And better, yet. It’s as though I were made for another world.
Am I at home in the world? Yes. Its waters and forests, megacities and villages, bus lines and bicycles make it feasible to find a reasonable escapade anywhere. When I travel, I’m at home in the world, so long as I’m with the people I love most.
But I still need a home in the world. I’ll backpack with gusto until my back gives out, but at the end of the day, I need to hang up that backpack in a closet, check my mail, and sip a drink with my next-door neighbor, watching the sun set from the backyard. I need to water my neighbor’s plant when it’s her turn to travel. I need to pick up my husband’s prescription refill from the pharmacy that already knows his needs. I need to harp on my kids to clean their rooms for the third day in a row. I need to lose my phone in the same couch, and stir soup simmering on the same stove in the same pot.
Merton continues about the Benedictine monks: “Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary. Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”
Travel has taught me the blessing of ordinariness, of rootedness and stability. It can be found anywhere on the globe. It’s courageous to walk out the front door and embrace earth’s great adventures, but the real act of courage is to return to that door, turn the knob, walk through, unpack the bags, and start the kettle for a cup of tea. In our rituals of bread making and wine tasting, tucking our kids into bed and watching stars flicker from a chair on the back patio, we are all daring to find ourselves at home, somewhere in the world.
EPILOGUE
Today it has been about a year since we’ve returned from London; nine months since we unpacked the last box at our cookie-cutter suburban rental in Austin. We felt it prudent to rent a house for our first year back, in order to better decide into which neighborhood we should establish permanence. It had been some time since we lived here, and rapid change has settled in, made itself at home. I grew up here, but much of it is unfamiliar.
We’ve decided to call central Texas home, to do what Thomas Merton advises and call its ordinariness one of its greatest blessings. The kids are adjusting to a commonplace routine of school at the same place every day, and the five of us have neighborhood pool passes.
We are also going to buy a house.
This afternoon, Saturday and muggy already for early May, we pull into the driveway of a house for sale—a complete fixer-upper, which is just what we want, to take advantage of Kyle’s carpentry prowess. The five of us walk in and greet a woman named Gillian, who is the childhood friend of my aunt Jan, and who is selling the house on behalf of her elderly mother.
We start the polite but awkward investigation of envisioning our family meals in a stranger’s kitchen, arranging our shelves of toys in these different bedrooms. I want to peek in the closets without feeling like a snoop. It is a good house, and it would serve us well. But this is Austin, and the price we can offer is a long shot for this neighborhood.