At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  The Medina of Fez is yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site and was first built in the ninth century by refugees fleeing current Spain. Today the area has a population of more than 150,000 permanent residents, is home to the world’s oldest university, and is the largest car-free urban area on the planet. It is fortified by a five-mile diameter of thick walls that were originally built to withstand attacks, but now they serve as a border between ancient and modern.

  We follow Nick and Erin through the medina’s blue-tiled entrance, an archway through the fortified sandstone walls pricked with tiny holes, like shortbread. White satellite dishes dot the tops of the ancient buildings beyond, and Arabic chatter murmurs in the background. Medina simply means city, and this was, literally, the city of Fez a thousand years ago. Men stand and chat outside their connected stores, showcasing piles of spices in burlap bags and displays of plastic toys in cellophane bags. A vendor sells a mound of conch shells from a moving cart; he yells his price as he passes by.

  “Snails,” Nick explains.

  We keep walking, and vibrant oranges and limes line the walls, waiting in stacked crates to be sold. A butcher displays skinned lamb carcasses hanging in his window. Young men doze on piles of rugs, and an old man chips away stone with a chisel, carving something written in Arabic. Smells waft around us, swirling through the air: cigarette smoke, roasting chestnuts, piles of paprika, raw fish. Upstairs, old women hang laundry, stretched across to their neighbors’ windowsill, while children ride plastic tricycles around potted plants on balconies. Travel writer Nigel Tisdall called this medina in Fez “the original live/work neighborhood.”1

  We maze through narrow streets, turning right, left, right again, each one the same dusty caramel color and packed with shops and cafés.

  “Do you ever get lost?” Kyle asks Nick.

  “All the time,” he replies.

  Tate slips next to me and says, “This reminds me of Turkey.” I give her a knowing smile and nod. There are startling similarities between this and the archaic, still-standing pazars in our former residence. We’ll be there in two months, and walking through this Moroccan medina whets my appetite, makes me strangely homesick.

  We turn a corner, and Nick leads us to a narrow restaurant, asks a waiter if we can sit on the top floor. We climb up a cramped spiral staircase so dark I debate using my phone’s flashlight app, and when we reach the top, the sun sprays through walls of windows and bores into our eyes. We take a seat at a table long enough to seat nine. Rooftops of the medina splay before us, reds and ochres; pointed minarets pierce the blanket of lower-level apartments and shops. Nick and Erin order a spread of food, and we sip mint tea from tulip glasses while we wait. The warm liquid travels through my limbs. Morocco is cold.

  Rather abruptly, the sky darkens and the sun tucks behind clouds. Gusts of wind begin to clang windows and shutters surrounding us, and at a window facing ours, a woman hastily gathers her drying laundry and bolts the shutters closed. Our windowpanes rattle and clang against their frames. Kyle and Nick try to seal shut open windows, but they’re delicate, breakable antiques. We watch them knock against the wind.

  We agree to second rounds of tea, and Tate reads a book while the four boys chase one another around the terrace.

  “Do you come here often to eat?” Kyle asks, admiring with his fingers the walls plastered in blue-and-green painted tile. “I would.”

  “No, but we should,” Erin answers. “This is some of the best comfort food in the world. You’ll see.”

  Soon, waiters emerge from the narrow stairway with arms covered in tagines, Moroccan earthenware pots with cone-shaped dome covers. They’re set in the center of the table and the waiters lift the lids. Steam wafts in our faces, and I breathe in the scent of Sunday afternoon. Chicken, beef, and lamb bubble in cumin-infused sauce next to carrots and onions, and next to them towers of flatbread totter high on plates. Julienned potatoes, fried, bob and bubble in a red sauce.

  “This smells exactly like pot roast,” I say.

  “It tastes like pot roast,” Erin says, eyes hungry. “Dig in.”

  We fork chunks of meat and potatoes, scoop carrots onto the plates in front of us, and drown rounds of flatbread in the red sauce. Our kids devour their plates and hungrily ask for seconds. The fall-apart meat and succulent carrots taste like relief, like home; I want to swim in the sauce, submerge my face and breathe in. This rooftop in Fez smells like a fall childhood day in Texas.

  We toast another round of mint tea after we eat, when the startling sound of breaking glass pierces our ears and wakes us from our food coma. A delicate terrace window has succumbed to shattering, leaving a wake of glass shards scattered on the balcony. Full-force gusts of wind bellow through, hint at more destruction on the horizon. We pay to remove our offspring from the crime scene and give our hearty thanks to the chef.

  Bellies full and the wind much calmer on the ground, we stroll slowly again through the Medina labyrinth, eyeing oysters piled high on carts, more roasted chestnuts, more leather bags, more metal trinkets. Another butcher displays a camel head in his window. Carpet salesmen try to entice us with more mint tea. A muezzin beckons followers with a call to prayer, competing with the roar of scooters squeezing past our entourage. Nick and Erin lead us to their favorite art shop, and we bargain for watercolor scenes of Morocco, a cheaper alternative to the renowned rugs.

  Tate whispers in my ear as I flip through paintings, “Can I pick out a painting for my room?” Along with her scroll from Xi’an, she’s also collected a batik print from Kenya. I go ahead and nod, bending our souvenir rule.

  “Wherever my room will be,” Tate explains, “I want it to look like this year.”

  Tonight after the kids go to sleep, we toast manhattans in Nick and Erin’s living room and watch Saturday Night Live reruns. We laugh at actors who remind us of college friends and reminisce about late-night drives through Austin streets.

  “Remember when Corey and John and all those guys showed up to Kerbey Lane wearing random clothes they found in Jeff’s mom’s closet?” A fond college memory of mine, since I was there working my waitress shift and feigning acquaintance with friends who’d arrived in embarrassing flowered dresses and white blazers.

  “Or on that train in England, when the drunk guy sang ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ when he heard we’re from Texas?” Erin adds. I had completely forgotten that one.

  “How about all those nights in your apartment rewinding the kissing scene in that Drew Barrymore movie with Michael Vartan?”

  Kyle chimes in. “Remember when Nick picked me up so I could surprise you with the news that I’d moved to Austin?” I stop and remember. His move to my city after our time in Kosovo signified serious commitment. My heart flutters with this memory. I love that we’re in the Moroccan apartment of friends who played a part in that. These people are an extension of family.

  Whenever I leave a place and move on to a new one, I carry a peculiar loyalty about where I once was. Ethiopia was a challenge, but when we arrived in Morocco and Nick and Erin asked about it, we could only sing its praises, as though it needed our defense. I think back to Sri Lanka, and the whirling-dervish monkeys no longer agitate me in my memories like they did when I was standing in that park next to them. I even brush off China’s pollution with a shrug, now that I’m months past breathing it in.

  I’m fairly indifferent to my home state of Texas when my quotidian days are lived out among its traffic and concrete sprawl, but I pine for her live oaks and cicada-singing evenings when they’re nowhere to be found in central Oregon winters. Or tonight, in urban Morocco. I never feel more Texan than when I leave Texas, and I never feel more American than when I’m abroad.

  I am years past and miles apart from my childhood, and yet those roots cling for life to me, no matter how hard I try to shake them free. I can be in my Turkish neighborhood, minding my own business, and a smell will waft through that transports me instantly to the swing set at the park next to my elementary school.
Without warning, my heart will ache for five minutes on the merry-go-round. Or I can be in Morocco, swapping memories of late-night college shenanigans, and I’ll crave a midnight run for chips and queso more than I can stand it.

  As I fall asleep in Nick and Erin’s bed, bags packed in the corner for an early-morning run to the train station back to Casablanca and onward to Europe, I connect dots between places and people. When my heart pangs for Austin, it isn’t the salsa or the flip-flops weather, the live music or the hipster culture. It’s the people. When I hear Austin I picture faces and names, Thanksgiving in my aunt’s backyard, being poolside with my cousin while we watch our kids swim.

  Africa has been Joy and Dave, Asher and Dru, Abubeker, Atkelt, Tigist, Clive, Pamela, John, and a million kids. It’s their love for neighbors, their families, their guests. It’s drums and flaming torches for tenth birthdays. Africa is old friends like Nick and Erin.

  Morocco has been a surprising balm in the middle of our journey, a slight taste of home. For months, we’ve surveyed the most majestic creatures on earth, the oldest civilizations still in existence, some of the planet’s most extreme low and high elevations. We’ve walked through fields of purple lupine in New Zealand and dusty desert mountains of Ethiopia. We’ve sampled the questionable pizza preferences of Thailand, Uganda, Kenya, and Morocco. I’ve lost track of various local interpretations of all the tea we’ve sipped.

  But I am drawn to these countries’ couches and stovetops. I keep scrutinizing their different types of light switches and windowsills. My fondest memories, so far, have been sunset conversations with my friend Joy about parenting, listening to John’s childhood stories, learning about Atkelt’s life in Addis Ababa married to an American, and watching my old friend Nick haggle prices in Arabic in the medina.

  North Africa is completely different from its eastern continental counterpart. It’s much more similar to our Turkey than to Joy’s Uganda or Clive’s Zimbabwe, and it’s whetted our taste for what lies ahead, farther on in our journey, back home. Or at least, what we used to call home.

  Africa is red dirt, camels hugging highway shoulders, blushing skies, waterfall drizzle, intricate glass tiles on the wall. But really, it’s people. It’s hosts serving postmeal popcorn, kids laughing in the grass, grown men laughing at terrible kid jokes, neighbors loving neighbors. Africa is shared community. It’s one billion people on the planet. It is the welcoming family of humanity.

  Cradle of civilization, indeed.

  Early-Dawn Expotition

  It’s just you and me, boys,

  An expotition of the finest.

  Banded mongoose scatter beneath our breakfast,

  Ringtailed, spry as both of you.

  Let’s gather our provisions,

  White noses and pink cheeks

  Let’s witness beasts of the field.

  Thundering zebras, sharp-serrated crocs,

  The cape buffalo, droll and brown-wigged,

  Wandering warthog, a jackal with caught rabbit.

  Let’s find the lion ogling his thoughts,

  Juvenile mane frisking gold-tipped grass.

  We will forget our camera. How about that?

  And so, this early-dawn expotition,

  This morning, just us,

  Stays with us, in cameras inside.

  We really saw the lion.

  Just us.

  PART V

  To live is to be slowly born.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  15

  FRANCE

  Outside of the United States, there is nowhere else I feel more at home than Europe. In fact, I often feel more at home in Europe. My favorite day’s agenda anywhere mimics a life in tucked-away European villages—walking to the market for the day’s groceries, sipping coffee that isn’t in a to-go cup, drinking wine with lunch without judgment. Where, for some mystifying reason, food is much kinder to my innards. I can digest Italian pasta with nary a flinch, and the gelato keeps me headache-free, although I cannot say the same for its American ice cream counterpart.

  Europe has always, always been my favorite. It’s marked my heart, soul, and the pages of my passport. From food to art to history to cobblestone roads that trip me every time, I love it all. I met my husband in Europe. I spent my most meaningful, postcollege, still-young, fresh-faced-traveler days in Europe. I swoon over French and British and Italian and Irish accents. I love Europe’s multiculturalism and influx of African and Middle Eastern immigrants. I’m glad Ingvar Kamprad thought up IKEA and Michelangelo said yes to painting that ceiling for the pope. I’m a fan of the Beatles, Sigur Rós, Mozart, and Daft Punk. I even appreciate the vague cigarette smell wafting through cold morning air in eastern Europe.

  Europe is, on the whole, my happy place. If I could afford to, if I had legitimate permission stamped in my passport, and if the people I’d miss most were willing to come along, I would live here. This small slice of land has my heart six ways to Sunday.

  It’s not perfect here. Nor is there one homogeneous, oversize culture called European. If I could, I’d take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization. Expat friends who live throughout Europe have regaled me with stories about their daily life that, were it my home, would indeed cause me to question my loyalty to the continent. Europe isn’t perfect. But she sure is lovely.

  We cross the Mediterranean on a short flight from Morocco to the South of France, where we’ll live this month. Vagabonding through Africa was scraping across hallowed ground, and it accomplished its main task: we hanker for more. Its resonance continues to shake me. The past month has left us ragged and road-weary, however—irresponsibly behind on work deadlines and clamoring for a kinder routine. It’s time for another slow break—as in Chiang Mai and Sydney—to catch up on work and school. What better place than in a plebeian village in the French region of Provence?

  We chose Chiang Mai because of its budget-friendly accoutrements and therapeutic resources, and we parked in Sydney because we had a free housesitting gig. Now, in southern France, we’ll live among friends. We don’t have local French friends, nor do we know expats here who’ve moved abroad permanently, but here in this village are fellow travelers we already know who’ve parked for a bit, wanderers who live like us, who know us in context outside our nomadism.

  Our flight lands in Nice, on the French Riviera, and we drive west through Cannes in search of a village named Cadenet, population four thousand. The road hugs France’s Mediterranean coastline at sunset as incandescent glows of evening lights flicker in high-rise flats. I sit in the passenger seat, searching my phone in vain for inexpensive-yet-French dinner options.

  “Between Nice and Cannes, it looks like the only family-friendly option still open is Quick,” I say.

  “Yeesh,” mutters Kyle from the driver’s seat. “Yeah, okay.”

  Quick is Europe’s answer to McDonald’s, and though we’re not beneath this, we had hoped for more genteel cuisine as our first meal in France. We debate stopping by a late-night market for bread, cheese, and fruit, but decide Quick will be—well, quicker. It’s late, and we have a long drive to our house.

  We walk into Quick, and Finn shouts, “Yay! They have a play place! Can we go?”

  “Uh, sure,” I say, and they run off. “Wait—what do you guys want to eat?”

  “Whatever!” Tate says, answering for all of them. Patrons look up from their hamburgers.

  I walk up to the girl behind the counter, smile, and ask, “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  She returns my smile and says, “Oui, veuillez commandez là-bas,” pointing to a box behind me. It resembles a movie rental kiosk seen outside American grocery stores.

  I walk up to the box. “Ici?”

  “Oui.”

  She returns to distributing fries on trays, and I touch the s
creen in front of me. Bienvenue à Quick, it displays, and below it, a British flag. I tap it, and the screen changes to Welcome to Quick.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” I breathe.

  The menu is straightforward and equipped with visual help, and I order burgers, fries, and bottled water, then walk back to the girl. I stand there and smile because I’m not sure what to do.

  “I will bring your order to you, ma’am,” she says.

  “Right,” I stammer. I head to our table, where Kyle sits with his eyes closed, halfway to sleep. It’s late, and after a day of trains and planes, we still have an automobile to drive.

  “Wild to be finally here, eh?” he says, eyes still closed. The kids scream on the playground through the glass, knock on the windows, and wave at us. It’s nine in the evening, the diner is half-full for dinner, and it’s as hushed as a library.

  “Yep,” I answer. I feel like I’m shouting.

  Food arrives, and I crack the playground door to let the kids know.

  “Yay! Guys, food’s here!” Finn bellows. People look up from their meals again.

  “Shhhhh!” I snap. They run to our table and open their burgers.

  “Hey guys,” I utter in a low voice, “Hear how I’m talking? This is the volume I want you to use right now. France is quiet, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Tate.

  “Okay,” whispers Finn, barely audible.

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” Reed says.

  We inhale our dinner and hop back in the car. It’s dark now, the sky starless. We drive away from the coastline and head into the countryside toward Aix-en-Provence, our only landscape headlight beams illuminating the road. Two hours till our village. Finn drifts to sleep in the back and the older two stare at nothing out the window.

  We pull into the village of Cadenet near midnight. Streetlights evidence spindly routes winding between connected houses, but otherwise, it is dark, lifeless. It’s a small town, and our guesthouse owners gave us vague directions via e-mail as to the whereabouts of our house. We know it’s just beyond the village, so we drive two minutes north through town to the other side and begin our search. Our headlights pierce fields on either side of our two-lane road.