Are We Home Yet?
Things are starting to look familiar in the apartment we now call home. The living room rug, dingier than we remembered but still clinging to the dried up Play-Doh that’s set like concrete , still really ties a room together. It was fun having Christmas in October when the boys found out their Nerf Guns, blocks, more Legos, baseball gear, and favorite books actually showed up on the sea shipment (when a handful of bottles of whiskey arrived safe and sound, my eyes may have lit up too). We’ve opened boxes to find cards full of well-wishes and pictures of friends and family. I can hear our own washer humming and dryer clanking around as I’m typing this. I’m not sure why we thought we’d need so many stinkin’ hangers—three overflowing tubs full—over here where they rarely include any built-in shelf or closet spaces at all.
It’s kinda surreal seeing the container that was loaded up in front of the house show back up at your new Swiss apartment.
As everything was being unpacked, this corner breathed some home and comfort into the new place.
I’ve put together 19 pieces of furniture from IKEA. I’ve helped take apart, move, and reassemble a wardrobe. I took apart and reconfigured some patio furniture from ALDI, too (these European companies must name their businesses in all caps because they know people will lividly howl their names fuming in frustration—or at least spit them as terse curses under their breath when their kids are in the room—while assembling furniture surrounded by allen Wrenches and dowels, particle board and crazily-contrived angles that no one should be asked to contort into while balancing the rest of the teetering parts you’re trying to secure…but that’s just how I put it together).
Two patio furniture construction workers taking a well-deserved break.
We’ve had our first holiday here, a Halloween week that’s included:
face painting and pumpkin soup at our local grocery store,
pumpkin carving,
no trick or treating,
a costume and disco party at a park with a bone-chilling (cold, not scary) procession for no one’s enjoyment but the unimpressed farm animals we processed around in a big, eerily-quiet circle. Cold and dumb, I think, is what Lisa called it. Lisa’s usually honest, but that’s putting it nicely.
a school party at Cooper’s school during the day and a festival for the whole elementary side of the school with trunk or treating and more face painting and more discos. That’s what they call dances over here, discos. Wouldn’t it be weird if they called all dances break dances or raves or mosh pits or any other time-specific dance fad?
Some people might argue we need more holidays back in the states centered around face-painting and discos…but as for me and my family, give us trick or treating.
This was the one time we smiled all day, before the procession and disco as frostbite was starting to set in.
Most of the time, this space and our routines don’t instill the same anxiety and exasperation we felt the first few weeks we were here. We can almost relax and breathe deeply nowadays. We’re settling into new ruts and rhythms. So now we can start calling this place home, right?
I’ve thought a lot about what that word home means lately. Of course, it’s where the heart is. It’s where you can be yourself, where you don’t have to try so hard or act like someone else for the benefit of someone or everyone else. It’s where you get at least a few of the people, and a crazy loyal few get you too. Home describes those places that come alive in technicolor, like Dorothy stepping out of the freshly crashed farm house. They’re saturated with memories, inside jokes, unforgettable sights and smells, “ohhhh, remember when…?!?”, and the occasional “that used to be…” They’re inhabited with ghosts of people who shaped us, formed us, loved us, maybe even hurt us…who brought out something of who we are today in us. Maybe someday Lausanne, with it’s beauty (there’s snow at the tops of the Alps around us now, yall!) and quirks will be a place like that too.
For me, home surely means a place of comfort. I’m a creature of it. Home is where I know my way around, where there aren’t many barriers to common sense or some sort of mutual understanding. Home’s a place where I can plan a day and more often than not I can sort of stick to the plan. It’s where I have control to drive where I need to go (with parking options that don’t get us all jammed up like Austin Powers) and places are open at times that fit my schedule, thank you very much. None of this most-things-close-at-6 junk. It’s where there are shared expectations of friendliness and warmth, and where glances aren’t exchanged every time the boys or loud or when I can’t help but speak English. I know, learn the language! I hear ya. French lessons start this week.
If home really means comfort, this might not ever feel like home.
I was listening to Dave Chang’s podcast recently. He’s a successful chef who’s started the Momofuku restaurants, recently opened Majordomo in Los Angeles, and had the hit series Ugly Delicious on Netflix. He was talking to a friend, colleague, collaborator, and fellow chef Christina Tosi about opening restaurants, failing time and time again, and what sparks their creativity As they innovate and push themselves, they both agreed that comfortable is the absolute most boring place to be. They couldn’t stand the idea of settling for comfortable. Obviously, we’re wired differently, Chef Chang and me. So that’s why I’m not an elite chef.
I like my definition of home. It’s cozy and safe and predictable…and the more adjectives I use the less appealing it seems. Maybe it’s needs some work. What can I figure out about what home means while we try to make a new one here in Switzerland? If we don’t open up, if we don’t learn and come away somewhat different, if we don’t let these experiences teach us and shape us, then why did we embark on this adventure in the first place?
There’s this notion throughout the old Hebrew stories of God, even throughout the stories of Jesus and those he influenced, of how both God and people often dwell in places. Dwell is a term that seems to incorporate both absolute presence and something less than permanence. Dwell is sometimes understood as setting up a tent among. When we dwell, we create connections, we live among, we exist here and now with others in this place, we stake our tents here…but those tent stakes aren’t necessarily cornerstones either.
There are stories of Abram and Moses and Hagar and Jonah and many others who for one reason or another are called, asked, and sometimes they’re even forced against their will to become strangers in strange lands. In Psalm 137, one of the most poetic and tragic psalms, exiled and deeply unsettled Jewish captives both yearn to remember the place they call home, and struggle to pick up their harps and sing with any life about where they used to be. Sometimes change and hardship and discomfort are the spark of beautiful creativity, and sometimes they seem to bind up the joy and passion that would stoke the embers of that same imaginative innovation. For most of their written history in the scriptures, the Israelites struggle with their identities and relationships with God, each other, and their neighbors while they are displaced, oppressed, and/or outsiders. That sort of struggle, that kind of lifestyle sounds a lot more uncomfortable than cozy and familiar.
Maybe I’m trying to find purpose, to make sense, of our grasping for home in a place where it just doesn’t feel the same. Maybe I’m a little in denial, but I don’t think it’s a sense of homesickness or longing for where we’ve come from, as much as it’s trying to dwell here well in the moment and in this season of life. Maybe growth and opportunity and reinvention are all just waiting for us to dwell with discomfort with the same appreciation I’ve carried for so long for comfortability.
What if the better story leads out of making your home where things aren’t comfortable, but they’re challenging and teachable and transformative, too? In that case, maybe we’ve been more at home all along that we’ve realized. It’s kind of fun thinking that this could be a new way of defining home for the boys, for us…figuring out something new and different with joy and speed bumps and laughter and frustration and grit and barriers and love all mixed up together.
