Today is one of those days.
No, not one of those days that leave you feeling overwhelmed, drained, lost or homesick. Today is one of those days that I find to be my favorite type of expat-life days – when all the places I’ve lived (including and especially “home”) can be felt in the air of the place that I am.
It’s spring here in Tana. It’s the rainy season. This means that everyday, at some point, it rains. And this is rarely some brief drizzle. It can be hours and hours of rolling thunder, steady downpour, and off and on again breezes that completely wipeout the humidity. And, it’s a really quiet day. My daughter is going on the second hour of her nap. Our housekeeper is out sick. I hear the neighbor’s gardener mowing with one of those hand-push, squeaky-wheel mowers (the kind that only the most environmentally sensitive Americans use, but that are considered quite a luxury…over the everyday machete…where I live). We have great birds here; they’re chirping away with their super unique Madagascar songs.
All these things together – the sounds, the dampness in the air, the dim light of the house even with the curtains open – make this like a day I’ve experienced before. A day that’s happened here…and there…and there. Those days in my old office in Austin where a bit of rain kept bus-riding clients at home and meant a colleague and I could steal a moment to catch up on a cup of tea and a chat. Or, those times as a child when I’d wrap up in this old blanket from my Mimi’s house and read The Three Musketeers. Or, when we lived in Japan and I’d get home early from teaching young boys sections of Casey at the Bat, the rain would start and I’d doze off for a brief nap. And don’t even get me started on how this reminds me of the rainy season in the Dominican Republic. It may be halfway across the world, but I can practically smell the rice and beans cooking through the drizzle.
Even the most adventurous of expats crave a sense of belonging. I believe these moments – the stream of past events that bind us through each stop in our journey – have the power to make us homesick. That’s okay, of course. But, they also have the power to help us realize that we can carry home with us. We are a part of something constant through the power of our own memory and the people with whom we share those times, even if we move around a lot. It takes stopping to notice. And really, not just noticing, but feeling the noticing, filing it away, making it part of our collective records of the home we hold inside us. That’s a good thing. Because we’re not home-less, we’re home-full. We’re a long, long list of places that we collect together into a new land called “us.”
