On Horcruxes and Homes

What a view. Cape Elizabeth, Maine

It’s twilight, and I’m at my parent’s beach house outside of Portland, Maine. I am out at “the Point,” which I regularly describe to people as my favorite place in the world. It is a rocky promontory jutting out a few hundred feet into Casco Bay, surrounded on three sides by sighing waves; wheeling seagulls; and idyllic views of other cottages, seaweed-covered rocks, and lobster buoys. Across the cove, the world-famous Portland Headlight twinkles once every few seconds; on foggy days you can hear its low moan, as well. This place, in its tranquil perfection, is a three-minute walk from my parents’ house, and I go there every chance I get. However, living the expat life I do, those chances don’t come very often these days.

This particular evening, I’ve come out to the point with a friend and a glass of wine. We’re having one of those deliciously meandering evening discussions about life, but as the sunset deepens, we can’t help but grow silent. The heavy clouds of earlier in the day are giving way to a radiantly-setting sun whose rays are somehow intensified by the low angle, seeming to set alight the thicket of weeds and wildflowers that grows down the spine of the cliff. Openmouthed, we watch the conflagration grow, staining the water pink. When the show is over, we pick up our empty wine glasses and walk back to the house. But as we start down the path, I feel a deep ache at the idea that in a few weeks I am going to have to leave this place again. I take a breath, straighten my shoulders, and put it out of my mind. This is the life I’ve chosen.

So, what I’m saying is: I was going to write about this anyway, but Pico Iyer got there first.  A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to Mr. Iyer's recent TEDtalk-- he has long been one of my favorite travel writers-- and I was excited to see the topic: "Where is home?"

Mr. Iyer's family is from India; he was born in the UK and has lived in Rio, Japan, and the US. He spent much of his TEDtalk discussing just what that means. When people say, "Where do you come from?" does that signify, "Where were you born?", "Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?", or "Which places goes deepest inside you?" When I got to this point in the lecture I actually had to pause it so I could bang on the table and grin and send it on to other traveler friends.

I remember the first time in college that I referred to going back to Wesleyan as "going home," and how strange that felt; how quickly going back to my host family's house for lunch in Kunming became "going home;" how I struggled to figure out if my apartment in Allston was 'home' in Boston or if going to eat dinner at my parent's house was "home." In Spanish the word casa translates as both 'house' and 'home,' which is confusing but poignant. Although I'm glad English separates those concepts, the word is still equally slippery. 

The ruins of a Visigoth temple in the basement of the Palencia cathedral, one of my favorite Palentino secrets

Going back to Boston (so easy to type the word "home" there, but that’s the point) this summer, everything was comfortable, familiar, full of love and history. But in the TEDtalk, Mr. Iyer talks about how the "beauty of being somewhere foreign is that it slaps you awake," which is a perfect way to explain a feeling I never had a name for.  So I wonder: is home friends and shared jokes and comfort? Or is it where one feels challenged and excited, always facing newness, that special kind of ‘awake’? Is it where one learns, where one works, where one loves? What if home could be all those things, could be multifaceted instead of one address and one family? My favorite line of Mr. Iyer’s entire talk was about the community of travelers and expats he’s built around himself. They, too, hold this idea of a multifaceted home. “Their whole life,” he says, “will be spent taking pieces of different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole.  It’s less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.”

That piece of phrasing is particularly perfect for the idea I wanted to write about even before I saw Mr. Iyer’s talk. Walking back that night from the point, full of an exquisite mix of sadness and joy, I was reminded of nothing so much as a Horcrux. Fans of the "Harry Potter" series will be familiar with the idea of a villain who made himself immortal by cutting his soul in parts and hiding them throughout the world (does that still merit a spoiler alert if the last book came out seven years ago?). I don't seek immortality, exactly, and I'd like to think I'm something less than a megavillain. But it still seems that the life I've chosen requires this process of dividing my soul and leaving it in places that are beautiful, meaningful, or otherwise part of my stained-glass ‘home.’ I feel that same sweet pain when I see the moon reflecting on the Charles River or walk through the colorful chaos of Haymarket in downtown Boston. I feel that loss, small but sharp, when I remember voices raised in harmony with a jangling guitar in a stone basement in Linares, the bustle of Calle Mayor in Palencia at 7 o'clock paseo, Bai farmers scooting their way across the wire bridges in the lush greenery of Nujiang valley, or rainy mornings listening to the foghorn across the water from the warmth of my bed in Portland. I’m coming to terms with the cost of exploring, adventuring, and setting down roots. Letting in beauty and kindness, continually constructing my stained-glass home, means making horcruxes-- leaving tiny pieces of my soul around the world.

And in a way this realization goes a long way toward explaining my feelings in the last weeks. As I’ve settled into Talavera, I’ve found myself thinking longingly of Sunday mornings in my favorite Watertown diner, Friday nights eating tapas and listening to Linarense flamenco, rock concerts at Lemon Society bar in Palencia, or the brilliance of fall colors on my family’s customary apple-picking trip in inland Maine. And I’ve been confused, almost resentful, at the realization that it's possible to be homesick in such a mixed-up confused way, for multiple places and times. I thought I could only miss Boston this way, but that was, in retrospect, a silly assumption. Boston has never been my only home, and when I really think about it I know I would never want it to be. Deep down, this is how I am made: to leave horcruxes like breadcrumbs in my path through the world and always be looking back to find them again.

My blended Pumi-American family in Nujiang, Yunnan, China

Suddenly

I was on the verge of posting my promised second entry on Semana Santa in Linares. I edited and worked out the kinks on the train ride back from a long-weekend trip up north to Palencia. But then--two enormous things have happened; suddenly. (And I punctuate that strangely because in reality that is how they have been punctuated, incredibly strangely.) Semana Santa will have to wait.

Since the beginning of winter, my Linarense friends have been warning me that northern Andalucia has only two seasons: broiling and freezing. As a Bostonian born and bred, I admit that I brushed them off. In Boston, your reward for surviving the long, dark cold is glorious warmth, an overabundance of flowers and blue spring sky, and ducklings at the Public Garden. Spring means a gradual transition between harsh grays and lush greens. It's logical; it provides continuity. Spring, between winter and summer, makes sense.

Which is part of why I struggled this past Tuesday morning, and all through this week. It's true, they warned me, but I didn't believe them. All through January, February, March, up until as recently as two weeks ago, the sky was grey and dripping. I needed a heater almost constantly to avoid shivering in my drafty apartment. I wore two pairs of socks to bed under two blankets. The trees were bare, the ground barren.

Then, after Easter, I got sick--horribly stomach-bug-bronchitis-10-days-of-antibiotics sick--and when I managed to emerge from my apartment and return to an approximation of my former routine, the smallest signs of change had begun to appear. I noticed buds on the trees in the plaza. On the train up north, the fields were a neon, almost noxious, green, full of new growth. My weekend at "home" in Castilla y Leon with my friend Hannah featured coffee in sudden, absurdly warm sunshine; picnics in the park; and my first sunburn of 2013... And then, back in Andalucia, I returned to a world altered.

The first thing we noticed when we got off the train in Linares was that everyone was wearing flip flops and t-shirts. We stripped off our sweaters waiting for the bus, and when it came the air conditioning was on. Dropping my suitcase in my apartment before my weekly flamenco lesson, I saw that the trees in the plaza were in full leaf, that kind of deep, shady green that seems like it's always been there. "This is some 'I Dream of Jeannie' sh*t," I said to Hannah. "You know, *blink blink* and pop! flowers in the gardens; pop! leaves on the trees."

I had my lesson (more on the amazing time I am having learning to sing flamenco in a future entry), and then strolled the usual 15 minutes back to my apartment. The strange feeling of having walked in on the middle of summer persisted; the twilight was that special purple that characterizes late evening in July. In Plaza Colon, one of the nicer plazas in town, palm trees shaded playing children in the fading light, teenagers in short shorts gossiping and chewing gum and flirting, old couples sitting on benches enjoying the breeze. Trees flowering a lurid shade of magenta bent their heads downward, heavy with blossoms. The scene was absolutely free of any hint of spring. I texted Hannah again: "I feel like I've been Rip Van Winkled, slept for 100 years and woken up in the middle of summer. I feel like I missed something."

It was an important sentiment to hold onto, because when I got home and signed onto the internet, the first thing I saw was my friend Maya, in Boston, posting: "Boston people: STAY AWAY FROM THE COPLEY SQUARE AREA. There have been two explosions at Boylston and Exeter, down by the Marathon finish line." Reading that sentence, I felt an echo from an hour before-- that feeling that I had skipped over something important and arrived in a profoundly unexpected place, one I had to struggle to understand.

That was beginning of a long, awful several days for many people, in Boston and around the world. Maya sent me the news feed she was following, and I lay on my bed, eyes glued to the computer, for some 6 hours. I felt lost, unable to process this sudden turn of events. I read some paragraphs repeatedly, trying to find a way in to understanding. But I just couldn't seem to believe the terrible things I was reading about what is supposed to be one of the happiest, most positive, most festive days of the year in a city that so many people (myself included) presumed without question would be free of violence of this kind.

For me, the most unsettling part was the idea that the happiest time, crossing the finish line-- a place that another writer on another blog called "the site of the most human potential"-- could be so suddenly altered. I had taken for granted the natural transition of winter to spring to summer; we as Bostonians had all taken for granted the easy logic of safety and order during one of our most hallowed days. But there was nothing logical about how easily this bubble of security, the one we all carry around with us that allows us to go about our lives without fear, could be so suddenly burst, nor about the perpetrators' desire to inflict such suffering (physical or psychological) on innocent people. Nothing made sense about going away for a weekend up north or for an hour to a flamenco lesson and coming back to a world that looked so profoundly different. I thought back to my "I Dream of Jeannie" comment, which now seemed weeks earlier. I wished I could *blink blink* this away, too. In my enormous, empty apartment I felt very alone and very far from home.

The next day I got out of bed with some difficulty, having slept perhaps 3 hours, feeling like a heartsick, shaken zombie. I went to school dreading having to put on a happy face, although surprisingly my hours of teaching that day were the easiest, providing something else to think about. The day was incongruously bright with that same strange mid-summer sunshine, its accompanying chirping birds and lush greenery. Around me, people went grocery shopping, drank coffee, talked to neighbors-- another normal day. Between classes, I checked for updates, found my eyes welling up at descriptions of the victims and the injured, the paramount importance of Patriots Day in New England life, and the kindness of strangers in the face of such sudden upheaval. A few teachers offered kind words. The rest were unaware.

I came home, went straight back to my news feed, and found a post from a fellow expat in China. Somehow, his words managed to echo my own thoughts, and it was a comfort. 

"Today I’m sitting in a virtual corner, all alone in my Chinese office," he wrote. "I’m surrounded by nice people (very nice people, I fact), but they don’t get it. They can’t get it. None of them are from Boston. Hell, none of them are even Americans. The few quiet words that they offered when I first arrived were nice, but they barely helped. Not since my first days after moving here, when I didn't know anybody in this huge megacity, have I ever felt so isolated. What I really want are some Bostonians to commiserate with, to hug."
"Exactly," I thought.

The next days were still difficult, but sleep and time heal many things. I was lucky-- no one I knew was injured (or worse) in the bombings-- and as Boston held vigils, I started to move toward healing, too, across the ocean. I napped, I talked with friends, I discovered a new cafe in the old town behind my house. Its umbrella-shaded terrace seemed the perfect place for a mid-day beer and a tapa of bull's tail in savory brown sauce (it may sound bizarre, but actually it's quite delicious!) Sitting on the bleached brick streets, watching the light mid-day traffic roll by, I soaked in the contrast of orange tree leaves against the sky. I watched a man lean his bold red Vespa against the brown stone of the house next door at an angle so perfectly picturesque that it almost hurt-- and felt peace for the first time in days.

But then Friday morning: chaos again. A friend had arrived for a weekend visit, but I could hardly leave my room and tear my eyes away from the news coverage. It was almost too intense, too bizarre, to be believed. Police chases snaked through what amounts to my childhood, tearing down Mount Auburn street, where I waited for the bus to Harvard Square in my bored and rebellious high school days; past the Town Diner (still my favorite in Massachusetts), where I've eaten dozens of eggs over leisurely Sunday brunches. I watched with horror as the media set up camp at Arsenal Mall, the site of many back-to-school shopping sprees. How could it be possible that the suburban streets five minutes from my childhood home could so suddenly become a war zone, transformed with the same surreal abruptness that had heralded this strange Linares summer?

With relief, Friday night brought some closure. My tired eyes stayed open until 3 am, waiting for the all-clear call, having to know how this was going to end. I fell asleep breathing a sigh of relief along with my fellow Bostonians, imagining our exhalations making my window panes rattle all night. And this weekend, although the summer has continued to blossom,  the temperature has fallen back a little. The trees are still in full leaf, and that specific summer light persists, but the temperature whispers of spring.

I wish there were an easy moral to this, a neat way to sew up the parallels I see here. But in the search for meaning (in something as enormous as the violence and upheaval Boston experienced this week or as small as a sudden season change) things are rarely so simple. That's as close to a moral as I can find: to hold fast to the small beauties-- the sweaty achievement of a goal, a beer on sunny bleach-bricked streets, a neon-green field full of new growth, or a picture of a city you love-- and to understand that that the logic and continuity of New England spring is an unusual luxury in a world that is most often abruptly unexpected, uneven, inexplicable, unfair. Winter can become summer or the dream a nightmare in an instant-- but (as I watched my city prove from afar but always knew in some part of me) together we can make it to the otherside.

Breaking up with Boston, or It's Not You It's Me

I've decided that this move away from Boston is a bit like a tortured break up. Not the happy, fulfilled kind where both parties come away from the relationship knowing they were good for one another and ready to move on. Not even the kind where both parties end the relationship full of resentment and anger. No, it's what I suspect may be the worst kind: where both parties understand that they still love each other but that their dreams are leading them away from each other for now.

I wrote here recently about trusting in your dreams to direct you, even if those dreams have gone "stale" (as a friend of mine here put it recently). In that line, I've been imagining Boston and I as a couple of would-be doctors or lawyers who always wanted to go law school or to medical school but happened, inconveniently, to fall wildly in love. Boston and I carried briefcases around when we were 3 or tried to take our parents' temperature when we were 7. Boston spent weekends studying case law for mock trial in high school, while I took a college-level epidemiology course instead of joining swim team or the drama club.

In the days before my departure we were so in love that I was compelled to ask myself: well, wouldn't being a registered nurse or PA be just as nice? I could stay here with Boston and still work with patients. Boston could go to law school and I could join a private practice, giving flu shots and writing prescriptions... But really, if I was willing to give all that up, why couldn't Boston just go into social work while I went to medical school and achieved my dream? Boston and I had a lot of impassioned fights about this.

In the end, though, no one compromised. In a turn of events perhaps surprising to no one, Boston stayed steadfast on the east coast. It was I who got on the plane. Boston and I said our tearful goodbyes. We promised to keep in touch, but we knew things would never be the same. And I don't know if I can speak for Boston, but I for one wondered if I would ever love that way again.

Boston, Berlin; Tomay-to, tomah-to

I arrived in Berlin late last night, and the first things I saw when I got into the train station were:

a) An advertisement for the Blue Man Group
b) A Dunkin Donuts

So I had a moment of Boston nostalgia around these two originals my hometown-- It's easy these days, since I love New England fall dearly. But... then I forged ahead into the unbelievably complicated S-Bahn-U-Bahn metro system, which puts dear old Boston to shame (there are something like 25 lines!) and remembered what city I was in, after all.