Moving (On)

If home is an invented place, why does it hurt so much to leave?
John Sibley Williams

The dogwood, with it’s blush-dipped cream blossoms that once guarded the very center of the front yard, has been gone for twenty years now. Why shouldn’t I, with all of my goodness, also be uprooted and asked to leave? 

Two large pines, two apple trees, a plum tree, a cherry tree, a grapevine, a forsythia bush and more clover than even a poet’s memory could hold have been excavated. All of the tulip bulbs, even the single red explosion that would surprise me each spring with the intimacy of a mailbox flag, are packed and gone. Was it a suitcase the garden beds used to carry out their dirt, with which I stained my fingers as a child? When did the dimensions of the back lot fall in on themselves? When did my prairie lose it’s freedom?

And now I, three decades in, already moved and grown, twice-degreed, heartbroken with two mendings, and a knowledge of loans, fitted sheets, GMOs, mass shootings, and how to change a toilet, still must feel this sentimentality for the ideal of home?

I realize the first three paragraphs here have been questions, which is likely an editorial failure. But I am more interested in what that means about my closure. If all of your belongings are out of a house and you don’t live there, when does it stop being your home? Is it the memory of a place that keeps it dogeared as important real estate? I think people who move a great deal have an easier time with this question, but I lived in one place my entire childhood and when I left, I left parents there. Perhaps in life there are many homes. Perhaps I was in the minority of individuals who could ever consider a house a home at all. I will pay for it, now.

What happens when even the memories are asked to get out and leave no dust? Well, you go back and leave nothing behind. It begins to look like a place nobody wants. It looks like prying back the metal tabs on the underside of a picture frame, removing the photographs, and placing the frame back on the wall, empty. It looks like a hallway of frames with no pictures. It looks like a wall with no heart, or memory, or access to the thing in me that is vulnerable. It feels like consequence. A house ravaged of goodness. My sore right thumb from those tabs. The realization that my whole life has been prying back little metal tabs, removing from view what is sacred and private, leaving as little trace as I can, a hallway that does not care if there are smiles in the frames, or not.

This is why the dogwood is a liturgy. Praise God for what grew and was seared into my heart. It was once chosen, once needed, but then was erased. I live on. We can be uprooted, or slashed and wood-chippered. We can be forgotten. But someone will remember us and somehow that is enough.

These days I wonder if my spirit knew something my mind and body did not. Growing up I hoarded pieces of life in little boxes. Bark from beloved trees, clippings of blankets. I took pictures of everything, wandered aimlessly with a video camera, documenting the whole of my existence in that house. The yard, the pets, the neighbor’s gardens. I buried treasure, I knelt in moss, I packed snowballs until the ice chips fell into my gloves and burned like fire. All I knew then of my father’s destructive capacity was what he harbored against the crabgrass.

It feels like this alienation came in like a lion, with its sudden vitriol and violence. But that metaphor does not sit quite right in my body. It is not a lamb either, even with its loud, chaotic bleating that summons desperation. It has been slower and more expected than all that. Like the never-ending ocean creeping with thousands of pounds of pressure, seeping up and filling in what holes were dug and left after a day of mindless work. Foam and bubble teething on sand structures, digesting what was, grain by grain. And how in the morning, you know it is gone but you walk to the spot anyway, just to get the lay of things. How it has been removed, but not from your heart, which your body tells you in your clogged, disappointed throat.

And the children, who either don’t know any better or know infinitely better than you, rush out again to build. They throw off their clothes and give their whole bodies to the water, which, last night, took everything from them but this morning gives it all back. 

Should we learn to carry our home in our blood? Should we reject the notion of home as a structure altogether? Should we build what is safe and pretty and smells like cinnamon in October and hope the Angel of Death passes over? Should I have kept the tree bark or left the photographs in the hallway? Is my sore thumb a penance for sentimentality? 

I would know what to do with a prodigal. But someone, please, tell me where in the Word of God does the Almighty instruct His children what to do when their father leaves home and comes back with another woman?

We do not throw a feast for that. We give thanks in our own homes, give thanks we are grown and moved away, give thanks we are loved by a Heavenly Father, give thanks that friends helped us take down our pictures without asking. We close our eyes and think about something else. We think about a single, red tulip being so brave, and blooming, and falling apart one petal at a time, even if no one cares apart from God.