Homecomings

 I’ve had the idea for a while now that these last few years have been all about change, and that my task has been to learn how to deal with it, how to make my peace with the many endings and beginnings that seem to be part and parcel of mid-life.    It’s been years since we moved away from the neighborhood where Henry and Jack grew up. And although we’ve returned for visits with old friends and neighbors, our roots are elsewhere these days. Our boys, eleven and fourteen when they last spent a night in our old house, are now seventeen and twenty, pretty much full-grown.   And our current life in New Hampshire (one son halfway through college, the other finishing high school)  bears no resemblance to the one we left behind (two little boys in the backyard, playing catch until dark).

The image I’ve had in my mind–of doors closing for good on the past and new ones opening before us–seemed practical and realistic.  Settled now, with a bit of history in our not-so-new house, I’ve come to accept the fact that all children grow up eventually and, in the process, families do change, and sometimes they even move away from cherished places.  Life chapters end. Pages turn.  We acknowledge endings, create new beginnings, yearning all the while for permanence and  security.

And year by year, as my own family has shaped new rituals and memories in a new place, I’ve struggled to make my fragile peace with Thomas Wolfe’s famous truism, “you can’t go home again.”  (Well, I keep telling myself, you can’t, not in any literal sense. The day you sign those closing papers, the locks get changed and what was once yours no longer is.)

And yet, lately I’ve experienced one homecoming after another, homecomings at once unexpected, wonderful, and profound. In fact, I am typing these words while sitting on the porch of our former next-door neighbor’s house, gazing across the driveway at our own old green house, solid and quiet and still on this hot summer afternoon.  Plunked back into our old neighborhood –and, in some ways, right back into our old life — I can’t help but think about homecomings in a more spiritual sense, homecomings that keep reminding me that everything is connected after all, and that although life is always changing, beginnings and endings might be little more than illusions, constructs of our limited human minds that fail to take into account the bigger mystery.

A few months ago, Jack was invited to participate in a four-days-a-week training program in Boston this summer –long hours, hard work, lots to learn.  “If you really want to do this,” I told him at the time, “I’m sure we can figure out a way to make it work.”  He gave it some thought, and said yes.  And I started looking into summer sublets on Craig’s List and putting out feelers to every friend within fifteen miles of the city.  A few promising leads fizzled.  And then our former next-door neighbors and best friends from across the driveway offered us their house.  They would be in South Africa and could use a house sitter; we were welcome to move in for the month they would be gone.

And so it was that last Sunday night, Jack and I let ourselves in to the house where he spent some of the happiest hours of his childhood playing with his two best buddies, Nick and Will.

“This feels pretty weird,” we said in unison, as we flicked on lights and called the cat’s name.  Our friends were halfway across the world by the time we showed up, and neither of us quite knew what to do in their house without them in it, too.  I put some food in the fridge, opened the windows, unpacked my bag, and then tossed and turned all night, feeling like a trespasser in my best friend’s bedroom.

Jack, veteran of countless sleep overs here and epic games of hide and seek, knows every nook and cranny of this house, but in the morning he told me that he’d had trouble settling down himself.  He was at a bit of a loss,  missing his friend and not quite comfortable sprawled out in Nick’s bed instead of in his usual spot, in a sleeping bag on the floor.

As it turns out, our old house is empty this summer as well, the owners having spent the last year abroad.  And so it’s been all too easy to imagine that, any minute now, we’ll just saunter across the driveway and be at “home” again.  From the outside, everything looks exactly as it did when we lived there. Which means I can fool myself into thinking that, inside, my dishes are stacked in the cupboards as always, our family photos are still on the walls, Steve is working away in his upstairs office, Henry’s picking out tunes on the piano in the living room.

All during our first day here, I had to remind myself: those weeds in the garden are not mine to pull, the blueberries ripening by the garage, not ours to pick, even if no one else is around to harvest them.  Jack has felt the tug in a different way.  The other night, looking over at our old house as dusk fell, he mused, “If I ever get rich enough to build my own house, I think I’ll make it exactly like this one.  And then it would always feel like I was back home again.”

Meanwhile, we are making ourselves at home again, right next door.  After a few days in Carol’s kitchen, I know where the pot holders are and how to use her coffee maker.  The New York Times is on the front lawn by the time I take Jack to his train at seven.  I’ve gone back to my old yoga studio for class each morning, taken long walks with old friends, visited the local farmer’s markets (better than ever), and bought Jack a pizza at Joe’s (exactly the same).

It’s amazing how comfortable we’ve come to feel, how  at home we are here in our old world, even after all this time away. It seemed perfectly natural  for Jack’s pal Will, who grew up in the house behind ours, to saunter through the front door last night and say “hi.”  Within five minutes those two six-foot-tall guys were down on the floor, practicing a wrestling hold, sweaty and laughing, as if they were both eleven again.

Two days ago, I took a stroll through our old backyard and recalled the planting of every bush and perennial and tree. Remembering all the hours of hard work Steve and I put in over the course of our thirteen years here, trying to create our own version of paradise, I allowed myself a weepy moment at the sight of the weed-choked gardens and untended beds, as overgrown and rampant with vines as  Sleeping Beauty’s entangled castle. But then, all of a sudden, something in me lightened, and I think I let that particular sadness go for good.  It occurred to me that this old, odd house that was our home for so long — built as a barn in 1850, gutted and turned into a house for humans in 1923 — has withstood both love and neglect, family life and family deaths, homecomings and goings, for over a century and a half. A hundred years from now, it will stand there still, holding its own silent counsel.  Like all those who came before us, and all those who will come after, we were just a few mortals passing through.  No big deal in the grand scheme of things.

And yet, the seeds we sowed during our own brief time here were not just for the vegetables and flowers that brought us so much passing pleasure, but also seeds of love and friendship that continue to bear fruit in our lives today, despite the passage of time and the challenges of distance. The day we moved away six years ago — a day that I saw at the time as a wrenching finale to our sons’ childhoods and the life we’d known — was in fact no such thing.  It was just a day.  Life transforming itself the way it does:  this happens, and then that happens.  In Buddhism it is said that all causes and conditions are related; that the world exists in a state of interdependence.  Because one thing arises, another arises; because of this, that.

And so it occurs to me now that I was mistaken to ever think of life as a simple series of endings and beginnings.  How self-defeating, to try so hard to grab hold of those things I wanted to keep intact, with the idea that permanence just might be possible. Sitting here by myself, looking at the empty shell of a house that was once stuffed full of us — but that is now the center of another family’s universe — I think I finally get it: home really is the place where I am right now, if I choose to make it so. And if I’m awake, and open, and loving what is, then I am always at home, no matter what roof is above my head or what return address I stamp in the upper corner of an envelope.

Addendum:  Last week, I wrote about a phone call I received seven years ago from my former sister-in-law, asking me to read her dying friend’s manuscript.  Beverly’s husband sent that link on to Jennie — and after reading my post, she picked up the phone and called me again.  This time, thanks to the imminent publication of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, we connected right away and heart-to-heart, like the dear friends we were thirty years ago.  Jennie works in a book store now, and within minutes we’d hatched a plan — for me to visit in the fall,  do a reading at the store, have dinner, and spend the night with her family.  It was as if yet another handful of karmic seeds planted in the distant past were suddenly blossoming in this garden of the present moment.  Phone pressed to my ear, listening to Jennie’s familiar voice after all this time, hearing such love and kindness in her words —  that was quite a homecoming, too.