Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
We must carry it with us or we find it not.
Emerson

A few weeks into first grade, I saw my parents drive up to school in the middle of the day. Our classroom window faced the parking lot, and I watched as they emerged, immaculately dressed. Both born in the late 1920s—married in 1956—in those days my mother only wore skirts, and my father was rarely seen without coat and tie. 

Moments later, the three of us were in the car, the back seat all mine. We must have gone home next, as I know I was wearing a red-white-and-blue Florence Eiseman dress with a white collar and Mary Janes, by the time we got to the San Francisco airport.  The next thing I remember is waving to my dad, and this strange but still familiar bubble of not understanding exactly what was happening. 

By this point I was used to saying goodbye to my dad while my mother and I went away for a few days, frequently to visit her mother a few hours southeast in Modesto. 

I would not have known on this day of travel that I would not see my dad again for months. I would not see my pets again for almost a year. How long are we here, Mommy? When will we go home? When will we see Daddy? I miss Daddy. I miss the pets. Soon I kept my questions to myself, seeing the effect they had on her. 

I always tried to get the right answer with my mother. 

The pilot announced we were arriving at London Heathrow haaaalf a minute early with the “aaah” drawn out as the English do, and I remember the eruption of soft laughter among passengers, including my mother. Another thing I did not understand.

There is much in these chapters, but what brings me to them today is the leaving. How one day we were living a life in Sonoma County, and the next day we were on another continent. Later it would be another, even more hastily planned year in England, and summer camps and boarding school. 

That same sense of leaving something important behind.

*

In two giant steps within the last year, I left a life I was trying to start. Leaving New York, back to Massachusetts, now in Ohio. All of my possessions except necessities are still stored in boxes and bins. It takes the wind out of me just to open one and feel a ripple of the life I boxed away, in haste, mid-pandemic. I want to go back. I want that chance. 

When do we get to go home? But this is also interesting.

G once said that she didn’t like revisiting old places that held her past. Like the dead skin cells we invisibly shed, she wanted them to disappear, or at least not to look back. She doesn’t have much fondness for her past, at least right now. I am the opposite. I like to think that a piece of me still lives in all of the places I have called home, and I continue to hold many of them close to my heart.

I also carry things with me. I currently have a slab of redwood; I once had images of New York City at night [Berenice Abbott] and a flowering dogwood canopy [Christopher Burkett/featured above]. Items related to the erstwhile set and setting of my life or aspirational for where I wanted to be one day. 

As I run the reel of all the moves of my adult life, and all of the things these moves allowed or forced me to leave behind, I think about the steps from San Francisco to Los Angeles, from Northampton to Florence to Deerfield to Great Barrington, to Brooklyn back to GB, to the UES and back to GB again. Twelve homes.

*

Somehow we arrive in Ohio, and there are plenty of days when I feel like I completely have lost my own plot. Others’ lives around me make sense, if imperfectly; mine does not. I talk about this with my therapist and am startled to make the connection to England.

[Prince Philip has just passed away. Perhaps this is partly why these memories seem so acute. I watch the funeral and without thinking, stand for the anthem, singing along, a lump in my throat. God save our gracious Queen.]

The best years of my life with my mom. Years I have no memory of being hit. I have no memory of her even being angry although I know this cannot be true. She was still strict as can be. But we were a team of two, and she truly showed me the world. 

Years which I understand now contained the unraveling of her marriage and Dad’s growing sense of isolation. Two separate tragedies on the ground of my guileless happiness. 

The Wombles. Paddington. Fish and chips. Trains everywhere. West End theatre. The ponies of the New Forest. Wellingtons. Hamley’s. Zebra crossings. Looking right then looking left (which I never unlearned). Tea. Orange Squash. Digestives. Penguin bars. Crumpets. Scones. Milk bottles at the door with cream on top. More tea. Uniforms with blazers, ties and boater hats.

The best years of my life with my mom were also tied to abrupt departures from everything I knew and loved and called home. I remember being in a taxi with my mother. While she was chatting away with the driver, I was having a silent conversation with myself, one self with an English accent (the only natural one to me at the time) and one trying on a twangy American one.

Years later when I read Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, I related to his description of Maisie as a “little feathery shuttlecock.” Even though there was no divorce, I felt forever in the air, in someone else’s definition, under someone else’s control.

*

As I have said before, Little G was the one to embrace my whole self, to accept me without condition. No one had ever made me feel that beloved, although my dad came close. She animated my whole self and gave me a radically new look at childhood. Here is the thing: I knew perfectly well it wouldn’t last. Nothing gold can stay, as Frost said.

It was such a precious time that I took notes, so as to remember better, later. Yet I have discovered that the memories live on not only in my mind and scrapbooks, but also when I visit places I have left: in our old neighborhoods and in the seasons, on the playgrounds and with the daffodils. 

*

With my growing midlife view of things, I begin to see more and more patterns, some of which may have started the day that my parents picked me up in the middle of the week, in first grade.

We flew 6000 miles to a new life, without the parent I loved so deeply, without the dogs who knew all of my secrets. Leaving London we drove to Southampton, a port city, to a semi-detached owned by a stern elderly spinster, and to a community that was not entirely welcoming. What is that American woman doing here with her daughter?

The public story was that we were there for my education. I remember my mother repeating ad nauseam, “I am a great believer in the superiority of a British education.” About twenty years prior, she received a Fulbright to teach in London, and our host was a connection she made then.

(The secret story of our first year was my mother’s depression; the second year, my parents’ marriage. Plus probably more that I will never know. I was born into a family of generational secrets on both sides.)

However, my first classroom was not a match. I recall walking around the room, feeling completely at sea with no one to help me and no idea what to do about it. I can still conjure that feeling.

But what I see and know now is that my mother stood then in her strength. She was far stronger than she believed herself to be. She found a way for us to live there; she sorted out my classroom situation, finding me the ever-lovely Mrs. Woodhouse; and she found us friends. Eventually she found us another place to live, too. Dad flew out for Christmas and Easter for family travels. And when we returned to England two years later, it was like coming home. Another home. And a truth that there can be more than one. 

More than one home.

More than one right answer.

More than one path.

It has taken me longer to learn the others.

*

I recognize something of a similar confusion and bewilderment here in Ohio, a deep sense of being misunderstood and regularly misunderstanding others myself, of it being unsafe to speak, of being pulled from everything and everyone I worked so hard to find. I thought I had landed and was about to begin. Instead I am in a new classroom, unfamiliar and uncertain. I don’t know if I want to stay or go. I don’t know if this will ever be home to me. I am also afraid that I will not be able go back for some unknown reason. Will I forever feel like I am straddled between two countries like I did then, rooting for Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon but also wondering if it was right to feel that way?

In many ways I am walking in the dark.

All of my life I have known homesickness, no doubt born of some of these roots. I never chose any of these trips. I didn’t want to go to the endless summer camps. I wanted to stay home. I missed my dad. I missed my pets. I cried countless tears. My first year of boarding school, I was miserable. 

My first year of college—my first breath of true belonging—I went to see Equus and heard Peter Shaffer’s lines for Martin Dysart, “there is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain—and it never comes out.” And then, “I need, more than my children need me, a way of seeing in the dark.” 

I thought: someone understands. I went back the next night to watch the show again.

Today this is less true, but if I am entirely honest, some of it remains. The bubble of the unknown keeping me at arm’s length from fully understanding. My fearful reaction to authority and of not getting the right answer. My chronic nightmares of not being able to open my eyes but being certain I can see, as if I am drugged. Running an internal scan of how I am supposed to behave, with whom and why. 

As I go more bravely out into this world, outside of what I know, far far away from home and feeling far less safe than I have ever felt before, I battle layers of anxiety that can wake me up at night in terror. 

What if. What if. What if.

I have spent years in therapy learning tools for anxiety, but this is housed deeper, it seems. More primeval. 

I need a way of seeing in the dark. 

If the bridle is not in my mouth, what then?

In so many ways, I do not know myself.

I do not know.

I do not.

*

And then, it is spring. I am still waking up in terror sweats, but as the crocus nods to the tulip, the dominoes of nature fall, and I watch three trees unfold: one on either side of the doors of our church and one outside the door of our rental apartment. I have been taking photographs of the blossoms for many days and sending them to a friend, watching each grow more exquisite. And then, with a bright blue sky above us, I shoot looking up. 

It looks familiar. 

It is slow to dawn. 

And then I realize: it is the very same white dogwood canopy that once was framed above my desk. An image that represented the life I wanted to live and the children I wanted to have.

(I sold it when I stopped seeking and started living, at last.)

What does it mean that I should find it here? And what does being here really mean for me? I keep asking this.

*

One day, years ago, when a dear friend of mine was very, very sick in the hospital, she said she wanted to go home. 

Her family and friends did everything in their power to get her back to her house, with a stunning view out the window, in a special bed, as her body deteriorated and her sight grew inward.

But—

You know, already, don’t you? 

She still said I want to go home. All of that effort wasn’t it at all. 

And if that isn’t the point, I don’t know what is.