At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  Because flight patterns and passports make it possible to be literally anywhere in the world, it’s tempting to dream of being there. By there, I mean anywhere. I can be in a hammock hovering over powder-white sand on the Mediterranean, and suddenly I’ll wish I were in a mountain cabin in the Southern Alps. I’ll be in my favorite megacity, and while I sway in tandem to the other bodies around me on the London Underground, I’ll drift in daydream to a plebeian village in the Swiss countryside, preferably one I’ve not yet visited. My kids and I will be canoeing down the Deschutes River in central Oregon, and I’ll crave insatiably for food-truck tacos in downtown Austin.

  Traveling means touching, tasting, smelling the world. It means the chance to explore hamlets and boroughs that citizens the world over call home. Through travel, you can know, firsthand, the difference in taste between the bread in Sri Lanka and Turkey. You’ll add years to your life with more layers, thicker skin, and a softer heart because of it. Travel is a gift.

  But travel doesn’t provide stability. And isn’t it in stability that we find home?

  Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton explains the vow of stability this way: “By making a vow of stability the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.’ This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with.”

  Choosing stability over volatility means staying put when life throws a curveball. It means digging in your heels when the economy sends your housing price crashing, or when community crime rates skyrocket. Possibly even harder, stability means staying put when life gets boring.

  I find it fascinating that in all our exploring of the world’s nooks and crannies, my three kids most loved the times we settled down and stayed somewhere awhile. A year after we returned to the States, I can ask one of them their favorite part of our year, and their answer is usually “the month we lived in Sydney and fed chickens in the backyard,” or “the month we lived in France and built Terabithia.” We bring up memories from the Great Wall of China, the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, and the Eiffel Tower, and after a few minutes of reminiscence, they turn the conversation, preferring to talk about the houses that accompanied them:

  Remember that loft in France with the Star Wars chess set?

  I loved Chiang Mai—we each got our own bed.

  Remember the triple bunks beds in Uganda?

  I totally wish we could have chickens like in Sydney.

  I didn’t travel around the world with my family to “find myself,” but I was curious what I’d learn about home. Can home be anywhere? Is home where I’m originally from? Where I’ve lived longest? Do we even need a place to call home, so long as we have each other? Some people live “location independent,” making the entire world their home—they’ll park for a while in one neck of the woods; then when the wanderlust itch needs scratching, they’ll pack up again and move to a new spot. Could this be a feasible way of life for us?

  The single most significant thing we gained when we paused in Thailand, Australia, and France was community. By staying in one place for a month or longer on our travels, we burrowed into our surroundings and invested in neighbors, even if only for a little while. We stayed put—in a nomadic sense, anyway—long enough to cultivate relationships unshielded by the next great thing to see, the next place on our itinerary.

  The nuns at Our Lady of Mississippi Abbey say that by taking a vow of stability, they are “resisting all temptation to escape the truth about ourselves by restless movement from one place to the next.” Resisting all temptation to escape the truth about ourselves. That’s an easy thing to do in our rapid-fire world.

  Just for fun, I snapped photos of mailboxes around the world. The aim was at least one per country, and I almost made my goal. I had no ulterior motive for this; I simply wanted a side project as we filled our days with train-hopping, worldschooling, and scoring coffee by whatever means necessary (which sometimes meant fashioning a pour-over from a soda can, a paper airline cup, and a stolen coffee filter from the previous guesthouse). I’ve always admired mailboxes, seen them as a focal point in a house’s curb appeal, and have lowered my enthusiasm for a potential home if it had a boring street-side gray metal box with locked cubbies.

  Before my mailbox photos, I don’t think I noticed that the majority of the world’s mailboxes are red. At least they are in the countries we visited. Many were impressive—intricate ironwork painted a vibrant cardinal, impossible to miss and oozing with charm. Others were less so—a simple, rusted box with a lid, available to the public and wired to a pipe on an apartment building. One in Sri Lanka was derelict, strapped on a fence and so faded I’m not sure it’s justifiably considered red.

  All of them, no matter how picturesque, meant one thing: people lived there. Citizens needed to mail stuff to another address that had, presumably, a mailbox as well.

  Mailboxes are portals to the rest of the world, where, with just a few stamps, we have access to almost anywhere on the globe. This was a marvel before the Internet, and if you think about it, it’s still astonishing that we could send a postcard halfway around the world in just a few days. If we wanted to reach back in reply, all we’d need is an envelope, something to say, and a few more stamps. We have access to the whole world, right where we call home.

  Where we call home in the world matters.

  When our travels ended, no one was more surprised than I that we decided to move back to Austin, Texas, my birthplace. Because of our life in Turkey and then Oregon, it had been almost a decade since we’d lived here, and the kids mostly knew of it as a city where we visited people. It was always fun, and we’d return to either Turkey or Oregon with full bellies and happy hearts, grateful for the people who provided our excuse to visit. But Kyle and I routinely bemoaned the thought of daily life here:

  Can you imagine dealing with this traffic every single day?

  Oh my gosh, I’d die in this heat, and it’s only May—I don’t know how I endured August here for thirty years.

  It’s gotten so hip and trendy to live here; let’s vow to not be one of “them.”

  We preferred to live where landscapes were magnificent, streets weren’t as congested, and crowds didn’t flock like lemmings to wherever the latest publication listed as the Top Ten Most Exciting Places to Live. We wanted freedom to explore our surroundings, and we preferred to do it where mountains were tall and humidity was low, and preferably where it didn’t take all the live-long day to get out of town.

  This is why we stunned ourselves by moving back to Austin.

  On our trip around the world, Kyle and I kept the question of home in the backs of our minds and the forefront of our conversations. When a locale proved itself pleasing enough, we’d ask each other—Could we move here? Could this be home? If nowhere pulled strong enough, our default was a return to central Oregon. That was our assumption, in fact, until the last month of our journey.

  In Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany, Kyle and I went on that date to that pub, and along with talking about the kids and their year of nonstop travel, we talked about home. I don’t remember who brought it up first, but we shocked ourselves with a mutual admittance that of all the places in the world, we thought Austin might be calling us back. Late that night, we listened to drunk Germans sing in the background and we stared at lights reflecting over an inky-black Bodensee while we brainstormed what a return to Texas would look like.

  Kyle said, “I don’t know why, but no matter where we are in the world, Austin has this magnetic pull. It’s like we’re supposed to be there.”

  A month later, we got rid of another handful of our belongings waiting for us in a central Oregon storage unit, packed the rest in a truck, and signed a rental agreement in the north Austin suburbs.

  We don’t know how long we’ll be here. We’re not Benedictine monks, and twenty-first-century life is what it is. But as our kids get older, we’re surprising ourselves with our unassuming, qu
iet draw to stability.

  Austin’s traffic has only gotten worse, and all the queso in the world doesn’t quell my hatred for the refracting heat waves in the steaming summer air. Turns out, we didn’t move here for convenience, culture, or our taste buds. We moved here because of people. There were just enough old friends and just enough family to pull us back here, and together with the Anglican church we now attend with ardor (we’ve even been confirmed as official Anglicans), we’ve unearthed what we found in a sliver of a fraction in Thailand, Australia, and France: community.

  This isn’t to say we didn’t make friends in Oregon. We managed to meet lovely people that we still enjoy visiting when we’re in the Pacific Northwest, and we hope to know them for a long time. We have family who live several hours’ drive away from our former central Oregon home, and we miss living in closer proximity to them too. But for whatever reason, it never became home. We loved living there, but our souls remained restless.

  Author Terry Pratchett wrote, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” This comforts me, here in Texas.

  We will always travel. In fact, we’ve got more trips on the horizon, both scribbled on calendar squares and in daydreams for the kids’ teenage years. Our move to Texas was on the condition that we’d spend a sizable chunk of our summer months in Oregon, as much as we could help it.

  Wanderlust is never truly quenched—as C. S. Lewis famously penned, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

  The more I travel, the more I’m at peace with the unslakable satisfaction of wanderlust. Its very nature exists on the promise of something better around the bend, and the stamps in my passport have proved to me my heart will always yearn for something better. And better. And better, yet. It’s as though I were made for another world.

  Am I at home in the world? Yes. Its waters and forests, megacities and villages, bus lines and bicycles make it feasible to find a reasonable escapade anywhere. When I travel, I’m at home in the world, so long as I’m with the people I love most.

  But I still need a home in the world. I’ll backpack with gusto until my back gives out, but at the end of the day, I need to hang up that backpack in a closet, check my mail, and sip a drink with my next-door neighbor, watching the sun set from the backyard. I need to water my neighbor’s plant when it’s her turn to travel. I need to pick up my husband’s prescription refill from the pharmacy that already knows his needs. I need to harp on my kids to clean their rooms for the third day in a row. I need to lose my phone in the same couch, and stir soup simmering on the same stove in the same pot.

  Merton continues about the Benedictine monks: “Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary. Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”

  Travel has taught me the blessing of ordinariness, of rootedness and stability. It can be found anywhere on the globe. It’s courageous to walk out the front door and embrace earth’s great adventures, but the real act of courage is to return to that door, turn the knob, walk through, unpack the bags, and start the kettle for a cup of tea. In our rituals of bread making and wine tasting, tucking our kids into bed and watching stars flicker from a chair on the back patio, we are all daring to find ourselves at home, somewhere in the world.

  EPILOGUE

  Today it has been about a year since we’ve returned from London; nine months since we unpacked the last box at our cookie-cutter suburban rental in Austin. We felt it prudent to rent a house for our first year back, in order to better decide into which neighborhood we should establish permanence. It had been some time since we lived here, and rapid change has settled in, made itself at home. I grew up here, but much of it is unfamiliar.

  We’ve decided to call central Texas home, to do what Thomas Merton advises and call its ordinariness one of its greatest blessings. The kids are adjusting to a commonplace routine of school at the same place every day, and the five of us have neighborhood pool passes.

  We are also going to buy a house.

  This afternoon, Saturday and muggy already for early May, we pull into the driveway of a house for sale—a complete fixer-upper, which is just what we want, to take advantage of Kyle’s carpentry prowess. The five of us walk in and greet a woman named Gillian, who is the childhood friend of my aunt Jan, and who is selling the house on behalf of her elderly mother.

  We start the polite but awkward investigation of envisioning our family meals in a stranger’s kitchen, arranging our shelves of toys in these different bedrooms. I want to peek in the closets without feeling like a snoop. It is a good house, and it would serve us well. But this is Austin, and the price we can offer is a long shot for this neighborhood.

  The five of us head out to the backyard, a weeded-over swath of grass and dandelions, and the kids start claiming specific spots for our things: Here’s where our picnic table can go; this can be a vegetable garden; maybe Dad can build us a treehouse here. I spy something standing near a fledgling tree, lopsided in the corner, perhaps a forgotten gardening tool left long ago. I walk over and inspect.

  It is a garden statue of Saint Francis, buried in the dirt up to his waist and caked with dried mud. It looks as though he’s been keeping watch over this corner of a suburban backyard for decades, with nary a witness to give substance to his quiet work. I smile, remembering some of the wisdom Francis imparted on me in Italy: “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.” And now he’s here, in a potential home of ours.

  I follow my family back toward the house’s sun porch, where Kyle has started chatting with Gillian. I walk through the screen door and spot an unexpected army of oil paintings leaned against the screened walls, stacked in twos and threes behind one another, some mounted in chipped gilded frames, others unframed as undressed canvases.

  “Was your mother an art collector?” I ask Gillian.

  “No,” she replies, “She was a painter.” My eyes gaze over the stacks of paintings.

  “Are all these hers?” I ask.

  “Yes, they were. She was just an amateur, but she loved doing it.”

  I walk slowly around the screened porch to admire this layperson’s ability to wield a paintbrush in oil; her subjects seemed to be everything from bowls of fruit, to children, to fields of Texas wildflowers, to busy city streets. She was gifted.

  “Hey—we’ve been here!” I hear Finn exclaim. He is pointing at a painting in the corner.

  We all walk to where he stands as he continues. “See? That town is where we lost my red sweatshirt! Remember?” He jumps up and down in excitement. I squint my eyes to scrutinize the painting. It is lovely enough, but to me it looks like a nondescript corner of a European village—stone-colored buildings with awnings covering doors on the bottom floor, vendors selling flowers, patrons being served coffee on outdoor bistro tables.

  “Actually—Finn, I think you’re right. That does look like Assisi,” Kyle says.

  “It does?” I ask. I don’t notice details with nearly the aptitude as Kyle.

  “By any chance, did your mom spend any time in Assisi?” he asks Gillian.

  “I’m pretty sure she did, now that you ask,” she answers. “If I remember, I think she went there, then came back and painted this.”

  “See? I told you,” says Finn. “It’s Assisi!”

  “That’s remarkable he would notice that,” Gillian says.

  “It really is!” I laugh. To me the painting still looks like customary old buildings pervasive all over the continent, but I suppose there is a razor-thin hint of familiarity to those cobblestone roads. I shake my head in wonder—first, Francis hanging out in the backyard. Now, Assisi saying ciao to me when I least expect it.

  It’s tempting to play mind games and tell myself, It’s a sign! This i
s the house for us! But I know better. The highest price we can offer for this house is lower than the going rate in this part of Austin, and Gillian needs a solid bounty for her mother’s sake. We make our offer, cross our fingers, and shrug our shoulders in disappointed understanding when we find out she has to decline.

  Our family eventually pinpoints the just-right fixer-upper for us, in a town just outside Austin I’ve admired since I was a young girl. We find a slice of land to, Lord willing, start burying deep roots; a foundation supporting four walls that will house our backpacks when we’re not out in the world exploring. This is a small town, too, and during our year in Austin, we’ve come to remember how much we love small towns—like Bend, Cadenet, and Assisi.

  One afternoon a few weeks later, my aunt Jan texts me to ask if I’d like to go to lunch. We make our plans, and I end with a reply that I’ll see her soon.

  “Oh, and I have something for you,” she adds as an afterthought a few minutes later. “Gillian wanted you to have this one painting of a European street scene, so she dropped it off here at my house. I guess you know something about it?”

  I smile, and my eyes water. I know something about it.

  A painting of a quotidian street corner in Assisi is mounted on the wall, humble and dignified, in our fixer-upper home next to a pile of Kyle’s tools and a plastic cup of nails waiting to be used. Her happy scene greets me when I walk in from the library and start the kettle for a cup of tea, winks ciao after I tuck the kids into bed at night and collapse onto the couch with the day’s exhaustion behind me. Even though she was collecting dust in a ramshackle Texas home while we were out there, she reminds me of my family’s adventures.

  She is now part of our home in the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I think that I was given the task to pen a journey that really included hundreds of souls sprinkled around the globe, I want to cower in the corner because I know I can’t thank by name that one kind taxi driver in Hong Kong, the delightful boulanger in Provence, or the gracious waiter in Pristina who let us use the restaurant Wi-Fi for hours even though we only ordered an espresso.