At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  He also hints how to find a glassblower happy to show loud foreign children a behind-the-scenes look at his talent on Murano, an island in the Venice lagoon. We ride a vaporetto to the islet and tuck past touristed streets of shops selling glass vases, jewelry, and statues to an unremarkable shop with a warehouse door in the back. We push the door and walk into a concrete room with stacks of cardboard boxes on storage shelves, and find a man blowing into a length of steel pipe, molten orange and red ballooning on the opposite end. A teenage girl with a fauxhawk opens a fireplace with burning embers, and he shoves the tip of his pipe into fire to reheat liquid glass. He spins as he shapes with heavy-duty pliers, blows, spins, bends melted glass to his will. He makes a miniature horse and we burst into applause.

  We hop back on the vaporetto and head to Burano, a lesser-known island than its counterpart. A swath of grass reminds me I haven’t seen it since we’ve been in Venice, and its halcyon allure calls the kids to run wild. They’ve tiptoed through narrow concrete walkways and mildewed waterways for days. Finn climbs a statue of naked women, innocent and unaware.

  Burano is humble fishermen’s houses and squinting lace makers, and shops beckon us with delicate lace wholly out of our budgets. Row houses are walls shared but separate with distinct hues: raspberry, lime, blueberry, and mango. Looking at them from a canal bridge is like peering through a glass case at a gelato shop. The kids call out their favorites and claim houses as theirs.

  Late afternoon is macchiato time for adults, and we sit at a caffé alfresco on the piazza while the kids sit in a circle and play hand games. We wait for our return vaporetto, slurping seafood and pasta at a tiny corner café overlooking the water, and watch the sun dip into the Laguna Veneta.

  The next day is our last in Venice and, therefore, Italy. We have work to do, but our hearts are heavy at departing Italy and so we leave work on our laptops for twenty-four more hours. The five of us play hide-and-seek in the dark bowels of Venice and we chase one another through three-foot-wide passageways. At one of its entryways, I snap a photo of an unidentified saint etched in stone, cracked and graffitied, barely noticed on the brick wall. It has stood guard over this alley for centuries and watched medieval and Renaissance children dart and dash through its shabby hallowed halls. I wonder how long it’s been there. I wonder how long the graffiti has been there.

  Italy is art. Italians carve their farmland, their marble, and their dingy alleyways as artisans. I think of Rome a few days ago with Dan and Bethany, when he took us to a pub offering twenty kinds of beer.

  “Does Italy have good beer?” Kyle asked, assuming the answer.

  “Actually, they have fantastic beer,” Dan replied.

  “Really? I thought it was all wine here,” I said.

  “Because there are no expectations for beer,” he explained, “it’s excellent. Belgium has strict regulations as to what makes a beer Belgian. There are no cultural rules for Italian beer, and Italians look at everything as art. They’re free to take risks, and they know it will sell because Italians are curious and are usually willing to try something new. For the art of it.”

  We all leave Venice the next morning, and we pass a piano parked in the train station, free for anyone to play. There is always someone there, tapping the keys as Beethoven, Busoni, or Porter vibrate through hollow train platforms. It’s empty this morning. Ryan sits down and plays while we bide time for our train. We are heading through Slovenia next and onward to our last country together.

  The train arrives, we board, and I settle into my window seat. Tate sits next to me, and we work on fractions for a while, then stop to pay homage to the bucolic, earth-shattering scenery sprinting past our window. We blow kisses to Italy as we cross the border.

  The sun blazes noon, and Tate rests her head on my shoulder, closes her eyes. I open the book I’m currently reading and find this:

  He who works with his hands is a laborer.

  He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

  He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.3

  17

  CROATIA

  The bus pulls out onto country Croatian roads, and the driver starts playing Taylor Swift’s Red album. Reed begins singing along in the seat behind me, and I tell him to lower the volume.

  “Are you American?” a girl asks from the seat across the aisle.

  “Yep. You too?” I ask.

  “Yeah, we both are,” she says, leaning back to show the guy next to her. I introduce myself and Tate sitting next to me.

  “I’m Megan; this is Charlie,” she says. They look road weary.

  “You backpacking around Europe?”

  “Eastern Europe,” Charlie says. “We’re about to start grad school, so we thought we better travel while we can, get it out of our system.”

  “So you’re heading to Split? Whereabouts after that?” I ask.

  “Bucharest, then Budapest. After that, not sure. We might be out of money then, so we’ll just go back to Montana.”

  I nod. Reed is still singing behind me, sitting next to Ryan and Stephanie’s oldest son, Caden, and Finn is asleep on Kyle’s lap a seat back. Tate’s listening to our conversation.

  “You know,” I say, “you probably won’t ever get it out of your system.”

  “I see that,” Megan says, looking at our collection of kids. “Are they all yours?”

  I laugh. “Three of them are. The other four belong to those guys,” I say, pointing to Ryan and Stephanie.

  “You’re all just traveling, then?” she asks. I explain our year around the world and our friends’ few months in Europe.

  “Wow, so you’re just—taking them with you,” Charlie says, surprised.

  “Well, we tried to leave them, but they never got the hang of driving to the store on their own,” I answer.

  “Seriously, though,” Megan says. “That’s cool. I mean, you didn’t let kids stop you from traveling. You’re just taking them with you instead of waiting till they’re out of the house.”

  I think for a minute. “Yes. True. But . . . they’re honestly one of the main reasons we are traveling now. We want to show them the world while they’re young. The earlier they see the world, the more normal it is for them. And the younger they start traveling, the better travelers they become.”

  “Man, that’s the truth,” Stephanie says from the seat in front of me.

  “That’s supercool,” Charlie says. “Man, what I would have given to get to do this when I was younger. What an education, you know?”

  “Yep,” I say. “I know.”

  Charlie leans over to look at Tate. “Appreciate this, okay?” he says to her. “Not many kids get to do this at your age.” Tate gives a shy smile and nods.

  The bus pulls into the station and we board the next train. It’s older, with more rattles, and it herky-jerkies down the tracks. It’s nearly empty, so we spread out to sleep across seats. I dream of New Zealand, mint tea, and Turkish delight.

  We arrive in Split under a dark sky, black waves licking a dock right outside the train station. It smells like fish and saltwater, coffee and ice cream. Fishing boats wave from their parking spots along the concrete barrier. It’s a few blocks’ walk to our apartment in the historic part of the city, and the kids are a mess of exhaustion. I pick up Finn and his backpack; Kyle picks up Reed.

  Our guesthouse host, Marin, has given instructions for us to meet him “at the palace entrance. You’ll see it.” We trudge past closed cafés and ice cream shops facing the water, then out of nowhere, a white marble walkway under a stone-hewn arch. It leads down a marble path, worn smooth from eons of footsteps and gleaming white from streetlights. A young man leans against the wall, scrolling his phone.

  “Marin?” Kyle asks.

  Marin looks up and smiles. “Yes, that’s me. Looks like you found the palace,” he says, and takes Reed’s and Finn’s backpacks to carry. We follow him farther down the marble walking path.

  “Yo
u really live in a palace?” I ask.

  “Did,” he says. “I used to. This apartment is where I grew up. I now live not far from here.”

  “So, what do you mean, though?” I say. “This is really a palace then?”

  “Yep,” Marin says, “It’s Diocletian’s palace. It’s pretty old. A while ago, they divided it up into lots of apartments, and this is where I grew up.”

  By “pretty old,” Marin means 300 CE.

  We stop at a narrow wooden door next to a closed restaurant, and he unlocks it with a skeleton key, ducks as he enters, and motions us to follow suit. A twentysomething Croat, Marin fits the type I see lingering around the marble palace grounds: broad-shouldered, olive-skinned, tall. Taller than Kyle, who is over six feet.

  Spiral stairs thread a narrow staircase, stone steps are six inches too high to pass modern building code; a three-foot gap between the stairs and the handrail threaten the most careful of sober adults without awkward backpacks and sleepy children. Finn can’t reach the handrail, and we have three flights to climb. I move him to the wall side of the staircase and tell him to keep his shoulder touching the wall as he climbs. When we reach the third floor, I look down and my stomach drops. The minuscule landing pad hosts another tiny door. Marin unlocks it with a second skeleton key and ducks inside his apartment.

  Beijing is the only guesthouse smaller than this one. Our slice of Diocletian’s palace is a kitchen-dining-room combo fit for two adults, a bathroom and standing shower just past the kitchen sink, and two small bedrooms down a tapering hall. The best thing about the place, aside from its history and location, is the price. For thirty dollars a night, this is just fine. I’m glad Ryan and Stephanie’s family have found their own apartment here.

  The size of our place doesn’t matter much, because in Croatia, we’ll mostly be outside. This land is glorious.

  Split is like Southern California with ancient buildings and cheaper prices. The sky here is cobalt and cloudless; the sea air left its humidity farther south. People here are young and beautiful. We drink cappuccinos at tables along the waterfront while the kids eat ice cream, and I feel like a slipshod American tourist. The palace is chock-full of trendy clothing shops, and we buy Finn a new jacket (his was stolen outside a train station in Zagreb) and me some new jeans. Ryan and Kyle tag team with Stephanie and me, trading kid time with work time, and we’re surprised that most cafés have fast, free Wi-Fi, unlike the more Western countries we’ve traveled through, like Australia and France. The kids’ playground is archaic alleyways and derelict columns. They run across open marble plazas and slide until their feet give way.

  I text a friend back in Austin to tell her I felt like I keep seeing her husband in a crowd, with all the men resembling his brawny build and coloring. “I’ve always thought of him as part Eastern European,” she says, “What with his body type and his penchant for beer and philosophy.” Kyle says on day three in Croatia, “Of all the nationalities we’ve been around, these are the sort of men I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.” The women keep their hair long and wear stilettos with their jeans. Nearly everyone speaks English.

  After the hallowed museum-like cities of Venice, Assisi, and Rome, and because we’re living in a veritable archaeological site, we pine for a bit of God’s country. The kids are clamoring to get dirty and we are surrounded by marble and deep ocean harbor. For our last full day in Split, we rent a car and drive two hours away to waterfalls named Krka, picnic lunch packed in the trunk.

  The falls require a benign hike on a wooden boardwalk through the forest. We stroll through trees and I breathe in the smell of dirt, stream water, and grass. It smells just as April should, and I remember that as much as I admire humanity’s architectural and artistic endeavors, there is nothing quite as sweet as being near the Creator’s original artwork. I think back to Saint Francis and his love for the birds, and I sympathize with his preference for grass and trees.

  Like Victoria Falls, we hear these before we see them, a cleansing rush of water collecting in a pool. Seven waterfalls spill into a murky-blue lake, smaller than Zimbabwe’s but just as dignified. Croats cover the fields next to the lake, dining on picnic tables, lighting grills, playing Frisbee and volleyball. Our seven kids disappear into the trees and rocks along the lake and begin creating another imaginary land of their own, crafted from sticks, rocks, and mud. These sticks look identical to their counterparts in southern France, and the mud reminds me of the same stuff that collected in our campervan in New Zealand. The kids seem unable to not build another Terabithia, a Pavlovian response to being thrust into nature. Tate and Abbie swing from vines and squeal with delight over the risk of falling into the lake. I watch from a boulder, a bit sad that tomorrow they will say farewell. One family heads east to Kosovo, and the other heads farther north to Norway.

  Reed asks me to help him find the bathroom, and on the way, we bump into Charlie and Megan.

  “Hey, guys!” I say. “We’re from the bus.”

  “Hi, yes, of course,” Megan says. “Beautiful day, right?” We squint up at another pristine sky.

  “Where are the rest of the kids?” asks Charlie. I point to the waterfalls, where our gaggle’s exuberant hijinks can be spotted half a mile away.

  “Man, that’s so great,” he says. “Seriously. What an education.”

  We say good-bye, and I wish them luck in grad school. In life. With kids. Without. I hope they’ll nurture their own wanderlust.

  On our way back to our car, we pass a surprising chapel tucked in the woods, made of stone with a simple wooden door. A cross fashioned from nearby sticks hangs above the door, and the few small windows are shuttered closed. The structure is about the size of Francis’s Porziuncola in Santa Maria degli Angeli, but it’s bare of any medieval or Renaissance frescoes. It’s a simple stone place of worship. I wonder if the Croats picnicking by the falls even know of its existence.

  I stop walking and stand in silence, soaking in the chapel’s abrupt presence. Everyone else pays more interest to a small waterfall a few feet away, and for a moment, I’m alone. This chapel seems to be carved out of the woods where it rests, as though its parishioners are the birds and deer, perhaps a wandering pilgrim taking the long way back. The incense burned here would be rainwater and new grass; the Eucharist a hunk of bread in a vagabond’s backpack, saved from an earlier stop in a village bakery. The door is locked, so I walk around its perimeter and find a sign. It reads:

  IN LONG AGO 1761, THIS CHURCH WAS BUILT AND DEDICATED TO ST. NICHOLAS, THE PROTECTOR OF TRAVELERS AND SEAFARERS. THE CHURCH HAS A SIMPLE PLAN AND NO PARTICULAR STYLISTIC TRAITS. ITS CLAIM TO FAME IS THAT IT IS MOSTLY BUILT OF DRIPSTONE, A NATURAL MATERIAL THAT IS EASY TO FORM, BUT AT THE SAME TIME SUFFICIENTLY LASTS A LONG TIME.

  I know St. Nicholas’s story, the man our family recognizes each December with gold coins in our shoes, the saint we paid homage to back in Queensland with sweaty summertime sandals. But I had forgotten he is also the patron saint of travelers, the person entrusted to watch over nomads wandering the earth.

  Over two-hundred-fifty years ago, people fashioned a simple chapel and dedicated it to Nicholas, the watchful protector of people like us. I think of him the next morning as we say good-bye to our friends, and as we hug the Croatian coastline heading south in our car. We listen to Mat Kearney and Josh Garrells, retell our favorite stories from our time with friends, and watch the sun slide between boulders bursting from the Adriatic Sea.

  Tonight, I fall asleep in another guesthouse, waiting for another flight, grateful for God’s reminder of first Francis, and now, Nick.

  18

  KOSOVO

  It was the year 2000, and Kyle and I were working for separate humanitarian organizations in Kosovo, a diminutive crumb of land that had been fought over for centuries in former Yugoslavia. He was rebuilding houses, while I was teaching English to Albanian teenagers, taking the summer to decide whether I wanted to work abroad full-time. I was with my team of volunteers,
sitting inside in the heat of the day, parked next to oscillating fans and misting our foreheads with water. That’s when we heard there was a new American in town.

  I was located in a village of a thousand people, two kilometers from the Serbian border. It usually doesn’t show up on maps, even the local ones. Nobody knows about the village unless you’re from the area. It was more than a little strange that an American would move here, alone. Still, we thought we should welcome our new neighbor with an invitation to dinner.

  But it was broiling and I was sticky, and moving required getting out in the non-air-conditioned world, where walking down the lone dirt road meant a show for the elderly villagers as they peeked behind their curtains for the latest news.

  I literally drew the short straw. Postwar technology being in short supply, a girl in my group cut a drinking straw and added it to the rest in her hands to determine who was lucky. I sometimes wonder whether I’d have a different life if I hadn’t drawn the short one.

  I sighed, put on my shoes, and crept into the blazing heat. There was a high likelihood of running into everyone in this village by walking up and down the main dirt road, so this was my plan. Twenty seconds into my search, I saw a mirage, hazy atmospheric waves blurring what appeared to be an American gait. The body was coming toward me about a hundred feet away. This was my Mr. Darcy moment, though Balkan dirt road instead of pastoral British pond, dusty blue T-shirt instead of a white peasant blouse.

  Kyle and I met in the middle of that dirt road.

  “So, you’re the new American,” I said and instantly felt foolish.

  He said, “Um . . . yep.”

  I invited him to dinner that night, and he joined our group at the one restaurant in town. I noticed he made an effort to sit next to me.