{on love and loss and going home}

(If you’re into listening to music while reading, I suggest Matthew Perryman Jones’ “Until the Last Falling Star as you read this post. It was playing while I drove through Tennessee on Saturday. Not many people get nostalgia like he does.)

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My grandmother died on January 21^st of this year.

Over the weekend, we made a trip home to Tennessee to go through some of the things in her attic before the estate sale that my mom and aunt have tirelessly planned and worked at for the past months.

See, my grandmother was a bit of a hoarder.

A Depression Era daughter, my grandmother held on to everything.  Everything.  Tax returns and unopened boxes of jello from the 80’s. Clothing from the decade before that.  Suitcases and antique trunks (I unashamedly snagged one of those), mason jars and paper dolls.  About a dozen end tables.  Junk from the yard sales of my youth when my mom desperately tried to simplify and clean out her house, only to have her own mother walk away with the junk she knew she’d have to look at a second time when my grandmother passed on.

We found a box of axe handles in her attic.

Axe handles.

No axe heads.

Just handles.

A whole box of them.  There must have been thirty or forty axe handles.

I can barely form a coherent sentence when I picture the dusty box sitting in the rafters in her attic. It must have been there for decades.  My mom held up a handle nonchalantly and said, “She probably bought the whole box for a couple of dollars at a rummage sale.”

“Just in case?” I asked.

“Just in case.”

Just in case she happened upon a box of axe heads?

I don’t know, but typing this out fills me with both laughter and sadness, and I can’t really tell if the tears in my eyes are from one or the other.

My grandmother was such an interesting person, and I regret that I didn’t spend time knowing her better. My mom always warned us we wouldn’t have her parents forever.   And she was, of course, right.  They are gone, and with them the memories and stories they held on to for 80 years.

We spent the day at my grandmother’s house, rummaging through boxes of smelly dolls (did you know that vintage dolls can take on the smell of a rancid diaper?  I assure you, they can), beautiful furniture, newspaper clippings from the 30’s, faded photographs of people we don’t recognize, and letters that my grandfather’s old girlfriends sent to him when he was stationed in Japan during WW2.  One interesting letter I read was from a girlfriend working in Havana, Cuba while he was away at war. The penmanship from the 40’s was so carefully beautiful that it made me nervous to handle such fragile papers…until I found my nine month old chewing on a mysterious newspaper clipping from the 30’s.  Such interesting lives my grandparents lived, and I only knew them as old folks who were living the last years of their time.

We grilled burgers and ate watermelon on the patio, and we fished in the same pond where I learned to bait my own hook and cast like a pro as a small child. My grandfather taught me everything I knew about fishing with a bobber.  My seven year old reeled in a fish right away, and I can remember standing in that same spot on the bank and reeling in fish every summer.  The chair that’s permanently cemented into the bank was my grandfather’s and it sits empty, reminding us all that this was his favorite spot to be.  My youngest son took his first slurpy bites of watermelon while my sister took pictures (because baby’s first watermelon is worthy of documentation in my family), and we tried to remember how many times we’ve eaten watermelon on this patio with my grandmother who loved that fruit more than anyone else we know.  The warm, breezy day was a snapshot of my childhood, and though I’m sure my family would laugh to know it, the goodness of the day pressed me with a sad happiness that I can’t name or shake. The smell of fishing and pond water doesn’t wash off easy, and the memories hung so thickly in the air that I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to look up and see my grandparents standing there  on the patio with us, arguing over who lost the watermelon knife this time.

On the way home, with the baby sleeping in the back of the van, and my husband and oldest son driving separately, I drove down the street where I grew up.  I paused in front of the house and let myself become still inside.  My throat ached with the knot of memories that rushed in and fought for center stage in my mind.  Here was where I went down on my bicycle and earned a pretty big scar; there was where I really got the hang of rollerblading. That window is where I sat and cried over my first broken heart. And just down that road behind the house was a cornfield where I ran the rows, a trespasser who didn’t know any better.

I moved away from Tennessee eleven years ago, and every time I visit I feel conflicted when I leave.  I try to figure out the odd sense of displacement I feel when I head home.

Because I don’t really want to go home.

And I don’t really want to leave home.

I tried to flesh it out a little Saturday night, but when I crossed the Mississippi River everything tightened inside and I realized what it is that’s hard about going home and coming back.

I’m different.

Home feels like it did eleven years, except that it forgot about me.

When I lived here, I didn’t have the title of “pastor’s wife.” Just wife.  No role of mother, either.  Only daughter.  There were few strings tied to my existence, and troubles were small and filtered.

I had to leave to become who I needed to become. I had to leave to grow up. I had to leave to learn that I was married to just one man, and not my entire family.  I had to leave to find my children.  I had to leave to dig out the gifts that were buried deeply because the thin film of contentment prevented me from seeing them.  I had to leave to understand that loss can make or break you, and sometimes it does both at the same time in the very best of ways that you will never cease to be thankful for.

On the drive home Saturday night, I thought about my grandparents who seemed to me like they’d never left the wooded corner of the world where they retired and lived out their last years of life.  But, I know from the fragile, onion skin letters postmarked from around the globe and the chiropractic college degree and the South Central Bell “30 years of service” plaque and the receipt for crating a dog on a plane in the 40’s from Japan to Tennessee that they were more than just their hometowns. They worked and loved and stretched themselves to become who they were supposed to become, who they did become.

Knotted up in my regrets and my losses are the gifts of love and life that I only have because of the regrets and the losses.

Sometimes the notion of home feels like a nebulous, moving target I can’t quite name or locate or pin down.  And I wonder how much of that is because I belong to Christ and know that the whole of earth is meant to feel like a nebulous moving target when it comes to the place where I really feel at home.

I think it’s okay to be untethered.