I, who have never been in love—not truly, not the kind of love you build a life around—still feel, when I see it in others, a twinge of recognition. You learn to love, my happy friends tell me, but when it first appears—without ever having been there, you know exactly where you are.
I’m less concerned with romantic love right now. Instead I feel a similar sort of longing for home. I’ve been reading Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, authors with close attention to small places. And I, always packing up and moving, can’t decide if I am more terrified or eager to be so bound to a place. In reading, I feel place-starved, lonely for a home that I have never had, that I don’t know if I can have without getting restless again.
At the very least, this spring I’ve had the time to pay attention. I watched the cherry trees unfurl their first leaves, then bud, then blossom. Before I knew it, I was sitting on my back porch as the petals fell, blown over the roofs of the rowhouses onto my laptop keyboard as I sat, pretending to type. On endless walks, I noticed when the bird’s nest appeared in the crook of a tree, watched when the river came unstuck with spring rain and strained against its banks, saw the foliage overhead stretch closer together, shade swallowing the trails more each week.
When my brother came to pick me up and drive me back to Michigan, I kept my eyes similarly open. I arrived in Jackson, population 32,000, just in time for late spring to give itself over fully to summer. Now fireflies wink from our front yard, and mosquitos swarm through our back yard. The daylight extends almost to 10 p.m., and with work from home interspersed with games and snacks and errands, my family seems to exist outside of time.
When I left this city at seventeen, I did so without a backward glance. During visits, I took the city for granted as nothing more the backdrop against which my childhood played itself out. I turn traveler’s eyes on Jackson and find myself rediscovering it—my parents’ backyard raucous with birds, the neighboring cornfields, the forests. For the first time I realize that I have missed more than friends and family; I have missed the way the air feels here on these bright evenings. I am from this place as much as I am from anywhere, and it’s this recognition that helps me know that I can feel this way again.
“My own experience has shown me that it is possible to live in and attentively study the same small place decade after decade, and find that it ceaselessly evades and exceeds comprehension,” wrote Wendell Berry. “Living and working in the place day by day, one is continuously revising one’s knowledge of it, continuously being surprised by it and in error about it. And even if the place stayed the same, one would be getting older and growing in memory and experience, and would need for that reason alone to work from revision to revision.”
As I move through life, I want to grant each new home this careful study. The people I love will always be scattered. But wherever I find myself, I can let myself slow down and pay attention. Rather than a string of half-remembered houses, I want places I belong to, where I dwell deeply, and ever after carry with me.
Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.
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Katerina, I’ve always appreciated your writings. This one especially moved me, as someone who grew up always packing and moving to different homes, cities, and countries more times than I’d like to count. A professor at Calvin introduced me to the word “sehnsucht” when I described to him this feeling, and it stuck with me ever since…Hope it can also resonate with you.
Thank you for sharing! I love finding new words to describe these complicated feelings. I think there can be something positive about this “sehnsucht” too — it’s the sort of longing that hints at what is possible.
I like how the theme of this one matches its composition, long sentences slowing us so we can see the details.
Home can be at once the most familiar place and yet always has more to teach us. It really is a beautiful thought.
This is beautiful, Kate. As a missionary kid and then a pastor’s wife I understood what it felt like to be always moving. People who had never left the small town in which they were born and still lived would ask me, “How could you stand to not stay in a place for very long?” I would tell them I looked at every move as a new adventure, because my family went with me, and every new place became home for a time.
This is beautiful! I relate to this feeling so deeply.
Appreciative of your values, your commitment, what you value, and why. Eloquently written and with an elegant simplicity that speaks deeply to the heart, mind, and soul…thank you