At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  Tonight, we decide it’s time to begin landing the plane. In three weeks, we’ll be back in the United States, still undecided about where to call home. We don’t have our answers yet about home, work, and postnomadic life, but we know they’ll come when we need them. Right now, we are still vagabonds. I think of the hat I wanted to exchange with Nora, and I wonder where I finally tossed it into the wind. We’re still crawling the earth and chipping away parts of us that no longer fit, but we’re molding new clay, fresh stuff we gathered on the road. The trip has changed us, but we’re so fully present, here in this Bavarian forest, we don’t yet know how.

  I want to write a rough plan on how, exactly, we’ll debrief the kids as our plane descends. We’ve chatted with each of them throughout our year, asking about their favorite and worst moments of a day, what they think about nonstop travel, what they miss about normal life, their favorite things about different countries. Debriefing well is to unpack a backpack and name what’s inside. It doesn’t prevent rough reentries back to a home culture—we know this from personal experience—but it can certainly help smooth the bumps. Tate and Reed are already thinking about a return to American life, but Finn has a limited grasp of time. We need to break the news to him soon: our trip is almost over.

  Kyle and I slurp our lagers and hash out what the kids will need to process: people they met, places they already miss, the aftermath and beauty of dividing your heart and leaving it in infinite places. The surprising and inevitable challenge of returning to life in one location looms. These are things we need to process as adults.

  We know one kid needs to hash out thoughts about friends, and another needs his own room. One kid needs to catch up on math, and we need a heart-to-heart about continuing school during the summer. All three need serious sleep. This is the stuff of parenting. Traveling never gave us a free pass.

  We toast to our three kids and marvel at their growth because of traveling, not in spite of it. We scroll back to photos from the Great Wall in China and witness how much they’ve grown, discuss how they’ve matured. Reed hardly needs his hand held anymore. Tate is solidly in tweendom. Finn outgrew shoes midway through the trip, and is already outgrowing his second pair.

  We walk home when the pub closes with a game plan to start preparing for a return home in the next few days. Just before I turn out the light on my nightstand, Kyle already snoring, I pull out a pencil and add to my journal: I need to work through every bit of this too.

  A few days later, we’re on our way to the French border town of Strasbourg and we slink down one last ausfahrt, this one for the town of Gengenbach. We know nothing about it, but it’s our last chance to walk on German soil. I’ve grown a fast affection for this country. Barely on the western edge of the Black Forest region, Gengenbach’s medieval town square hosts the world’s largest Advent calendar through its town hall’s twenty-four windows. It also has some bang-up lemon gelato by the main fountain. It’s home to the second labyrinth of our trip.

  The kids play in the park that afternoon in Gengenbach, and Kyle watches them from the bench while he chats with his parents. I have a few quiet minutes alone.

  Shoes tossed aside, I step into the labyrinth and begin my prayer from Chiang Mai: Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me. I have questions for God. What has this epically long family road trip taught me about myself? How have I changed? How am I still the same? How is God speaking to me through the sheer act of travel? I remember St. Nicholas, the patron saint of vagabonds.

  I know, in my soul, that a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.

  I step deeper into the labyrinth, one more step, two steps, one foot in front of the other.

  Even so, my innards ache for home. My heart has a magnetic pull toward an earthly center, a place of permanence. I want passport stamps, so long as I have a drawer to keep that passport in at the end of a trip. Giving up a home this year felt like swinging on a netless trapeze. The kids are eager for a home, to be in their own beds with blankets and stuffed animals. Kyle is eager to dust off his tools and get back to woodworking. I pine for my books, splayed on a shelf instead of an e-reader. My soul feels pulled in two directions: toward home, and toward another unknown road in another town.

  God, why do I have both wanderlust and a yearning for home? I step deeper, closer to the center. This labyrinthine path, a circular back-and-forth toward a central ebenezer, resembles our family’s year. It zigzags, rambles out farther then returns closer, takes the long road to its destination. The rock stays unchanged. No matter how many times I’d try to rewalk this path, I’ll wind up at the same rock.

  Wanderlust and my longing for home are birthed from the same place: a desire to find the ultimate spot this side of heaven. When I stir soup at my stove, I drift to a distant island. When I’m on the road with my backpack, my heart wanders back to my couch, my favorite coffee cup. My equal pull between both are fueled by my hardwired desire for heaven on earth. And I know I’ll never find it.

  I stop at the labyrinth center, and I think of the stanza to one of my favorite poems, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

  Earth’s crammed with heaven,

  And every common bush afire with God:

  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

  The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. . . .

  I’ve seen an earth crammed with heaven. Hints of its existence are dropped all over the place, even in the birthplace of Hitler. If I could see to the fathoms beneath the surface, I’d see the secret behind all these common bushes, the roots of Thai banana trees and the avocado trees of Uganda. They’d wink at me, sharing their secret and nodding in affirmation at my bare feet. I press my naked toes into the labyrinth’s gravel path.

  I love finding one more new place to explore, I love showing it to my kids, and I love wandering those new streets with Kyle. But unless the flickering bushes compel me to remove my shoes, traveling the world will never satisfy. Neither will the daily liturgy of normal life back home. The laundry folding and bill paying would do me in. I’d resign myself to plucking blackberries.

  The way to reconcile my wanderlust with life back home is to lean in to the tension, to extol life’s haunting inability to ever fully satisfy. Life’s full of paradoxes, after all. Why shouldn’t this be one more of them?

  21

  ENGLAND

  We spend a week in Normandy and Paris, showing my in-laws my second-favorite European city and touching the sacred sands of Omaha Beach. Daily gelatos are replaced by daily crêpes. We climb the steps up the Eiffel Tower, devour a box of macarons from Lauderée on the Champs-Élysées, and wander the Pompidou and Louvre. I queue at Shakespeare and Company while the family sips cappuccinos and sodas in a crowded café across the street from Notre Dame, and we take a family selfie underneath the Arc de Triomphe. We pack all of Paris into a few short days, then hop on a puddle-jumper to my first-favorite European city.

  I’ve been to London at least five times before, but it’s been a while, and the kids have never been. Kyle’s only been once, when we were engaged, and it was such a short jaunt and we were so poor, we did almost nothing. I am eager to show my favorite people my favorite city.

  Ending in London isn’t an accident. Except for Australia, now more than ten thousand miles away, its culture is most similar to our own. There are differences, of course, but the disparities between the United States and Britain, and the United States and, say, China? There’s no comparison.

  Our primary agenda is togetherness. We walk by Big Ben, the London Eye, the
Globe Theatre, the Tower Bridge, and they form the backdrop for family chats about what life will soon look like. We sigh with relief at the lack of a language barrier, and we make heavy use of the cleanest metro system in the world. I also want to find a souvenir of my own.

  We’ve been collecting art this year, rolling up prints and tea towels in a travel tube, grateful for lightweight mobility. I’d eye a ceramic tea set in Sri Lanka or a gumwood bench in Australia, yet our lengthy backpack living couldn’t justify them. But London is our last stop. I want to find something.

  I reckon I’ll find what I’m looking for on Portobello Road in one of London’s most iconic markets. It’s in Notting Hill, one of my favorite areas. Every Saturday, the street and surrounding alleys of Notting Hill fill with throngs of booths offering antiques, books, vintage clothing, and records, with even more hordes of people eager to browse and buy. It’s a collector’s dream, it’s a Highly Sensitive Person’s nightmare, and if you want something British besides a Union Jack magnet or snow globe, it’s worth the overwhelm.

  All morning, we skirt the alleys and main street, weave through crowds, and stop at booths to eye old-fashioned cameras, teacups honoring the queen’s jubilee, and forty-year-old double-decker bus toys. I drool over old copies of Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh, but nothing is priced well enough for my few precious pounds, so by lunch, I resign myself to fish and chips. From Notting Hill, we head toward the Tube station, and on the way, I see precisely what I want. It’s nothing special—a silver pitcher, part of a long-gone tea set, now orphaned and priced to move. Eight inches tall, tarnished, and boxy shaped with a flip-top lid, it’s not worth much to anyone. But I want it. It could be used for tea, or it could house flowers as a vase. Probably, though, it’ll sit on top of a stack of books, high on my bookshelf, as a reminder of our year around the world. It is lovely.

  Engraved on the front, in plain-set typography, are the words Rosebery Felixstowe. I have no idea what this means, so I ask the booth’s vendor, who’s busy making change for other buyers.

  “No idea, love. It’s old and missing its set, so it’s hard to say. But it’s yours for ten pounds,” he says. He returns to haggling a price on a set of teaspoons. I toss the man a ten-pound note, wave thanks, and tuck my new silver pitcher into my backpack.

  When we return to our flat I search for Rosebery Felixstowe on the Internet, and I discover that Rosebery is a short neighborhood street in the seaside town of Felixstowe, not far from Ipswich. I’ve never been there, I have to find its whereabouts on a map, and until now, I’ve had little interest in visiting that part of England.

  I’m a confessed Anglophile, my loyalty second only to Europe as a whole. When I graduated college, I backpacked around the United Kingdom with a girlfriend, and a year later, I returned with a group of friends for two more weeks. I love English gardens, my favorite movies and books tend to be set somewhere in the British Empire, and of course, I still dream of a white owl delivering an acceptance letter to Hogwarts. High on my travel list is a month in a rental car, winding backcountry roads in summertime with the family. I want to visit the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Yorkshire, head up to Scotland’s Isle of Skye and the Shetland Islands, touch base in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. I want to nibble on scones in Canterbury. And now? I want to visit unassuming, unknown Felixstowe.

  Back home, wherever that is, I’ll display my heavyweight silver pitcher. Its engraving, front and center, will equally remind me that I’ll never see it all, all the places people call home, where they shop for bread and what they eat for dinner. Rosebery Felixstowe is home to someone else, and I’d like to see it, firsthand. What’s the street of Rosebery like? My pitcher will be in my American home, waving its English flag and reminding me to get back out.

  Two days before our flight back to the States, we spend the afternoon in Hyde Park, a green haven in the midst of the city. The kids need to run, Kyle and I need to rest, and we all need to chat, one last time, about our trip’s end. The kids play for hours on the pirate ship at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, and Kyle and I take turns napping. Near dinnertime, we gather our jackets for a final stroll through the grass.

  “All right, kids,” Kyle says as they climb up a log, “favorite park you played at this year?”

  “This one!” declares Finn, little thought beyond the present.

  “Hmm . . .” Tate pauses for a moment. “I think the park in Germany, the one with the supersteep slides.”

  “Oh yeah—that’s my favorite!” Finn says.

  “Where was that one park with all the tree logs stuck together, like a jungle gym treehouse?” Reed asks.

  “That was Strasbourg, in France,” I say.

  “Okay. Then that one’s my favorite,” he decides.

  We can mark time on the trip by playgrounds. Princess Di’s memorial playground is our last stop, and before this, there was the creative conglomeration of logs in Strasbourg, France, more art than child’s plaything. Before that was the modern decagon in the courtyard of our apartment in Innsbruck, Austria. There was the Bavarian theme park in the woods, of course, and before that, our well-loved neighborhood park in Turkey, where the swings still dragged too close to the ground. The kids played in the microscopic play space at the restaurant in Kosovo, where Kyle and I first flirted many years ago, and the Zagreb airport’s outdoor playground was a surprise during a layover in Croatia. In Jinja, Uganda, the kids climbed the wooden fort at Sole Hope’s guesthouse, and back in Queensland, Australia, they splashed in a park of hoses and sprinklers to soak off December sweat. The airport in Singapore had several playgrounds worthy of awards, naturally, and in Chiang Mai, we lived by a play structure full of old tires and chains, perfect for climbing. Before that, in Hong Kong, we wandered a park with an aquarium and a bamboo-hungry panda, and at our friend’s apartment in Xi’an, China, the neighborhood kids met in the courtyard to climb monkey bars while elderly neighbors made laps on the sidewalk.

  “Hey—do you remember all that exercise equipment on the streets in Beijing?” Tate asks as we head back to our guesthouse in Camden Town, where we’ll start packing for the last time.

  “What exercise equipment?” Reed asks.

  “You remember. All those twisty machines and stuff we played on,” she says.

  “That was for exercising?” Reed says, surprised. “I thought those were playgrounds.” China has a penchant for exercise machines, free to the public and lined along urban sidewalks.

  “That was a long time ago, at the beginning of our trip,” Kyle muses, picking up a rock in the grass. “Back when we were still getting over jet lag. We’ve done a ton of stuff since then.”

  “Oh yeah, remember how Finn woke up in the middle of the night, looking through the empty fridge in Beijing?” Tate asks. “And how he was so tired he was talking in his sleep?”

  “I don’t remember that!” Finn says. “What did I say?”

  “Bananas!” Reed says. They double over with laughter.

  “Come on guys,” I say, grabbing Kyle’s hand. “We’ve got a big flight coming up. Let’s go make dinner so we can get a decent bedtime.”

  Turkish Dust

  Twenty layers of civilization park beneath parking lots,

  Each dusted by feet of descendants.

  You’ve played on the broken-free columns

  Sarcophagus in shambles, a keen spot for play

  We dance on the dead, we’re alive longer and stronger.

  Take this, all this,

  And take none of it for granted.

  We walk hallowed halls and

  You play on Corinthian columns

  And soon we are like them.

  Dust.

  Art, marble, music worldwide splay glory in remembrance

  That this, this too, shall all pass, as with us

  Collected into glory like them.

  Renewed.

  We set out one day more,

  One foot in front of another

  And another
, and another,

  Around the bend, in awe of it all.

  Earth is, after all,

  crammed with heaven.

  PART VI

  Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

  —Pat Conroy

  22

  RETURNING

  Benedictine monks take, among other vows, a vow of stability. In it, they promise to stay in the monastic community in which they enter, and to not move unless they’re sent elsewhere by their superiors. They stay put. If this idea was so radical during Benedict’s sixth-century Italian life that it called for a monastic vow, imagine how utterly antithetical this idea is to our frenetic, whirlwind twenty-first-century society. I can’t imagine the possibility of this kind of rootedness.

  Six in ten adults move to a new community at least once in their lives, and the average length of a job is only 4.4 years now. Smartphones, Wi-Fi, toll roads, and commuter jets make it a cinch for modern-day nomads to work from anywhere and take their lives on the road. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily; the average Western adult has a range and reach that Benedict and his followers could not fathom a thousand years ago. We can visit lifesaving doctors the next state over; we can surprise our mother on her birthday across the country; we can interview for a new job stationed a thousand miles away before we say yes to it.

  For those of us who can take our work wherever we go, contemporary infrastructure paves the road to geographical freedom. We can check e-mail from a chaise longue on a Thai beach. We can Skype with our boss from an Austrian coffee shop. Our work deadlines are dependent only on a decent Internet connection and foresight to calculate the time difference. Add worldschooling to the mix, and the whole family can be anywhere, together.

  Modern conveniences make for grand adventures. But they don’t always cultivate stability.