On displacement, again

We are buckled into our seats, surrounded by bags and pillows—things we have decided we need for another night not in our home.  Just minutes away from our cousin’s home, the baby throws up.  She woke up with a fever.  It covers her, the favorite blanket, and car seat.  A sick baby isn’t up for a weekend of being guests in someone else’s home.  She needs me always and I stroke her forehead, it’s so hot.  I hold her close as she shakes and cries.  She doesn’t chase the fluffy little dog that always makes her laugh.  She doesn’t follow around her siblings or attempt to scale the tall stairs.  At night, when she wakes, I collect her from bed and bring her to the cot in the living room.  The rest of the family stirs at her discomfort and most likely, the rest of the house does, too.

The week is long and frustrating.  Sewage backup, an endless stream of insurance calls, plumbers, restoration workers, and landlord communications.  The exclusion at the bottom of a policy that leaves them without responsibility and us overwhelmed.  I want to scream all the words I only say in my head. I want to splash outrage across everything we see.  Because, tell me how I’m going to manage living in half our home for the next month as the rest is rebuilt.  Tell me how a functioning kitchen is not a requirement for a “livable” home. Tell me the point of insurance, if it doesn’t help. And yet.  I bite my lip and sigh a lot.

Just last month when we lived with my mom, I was struck with such a feeling of displacement.  All the endings and beginnings of the season left me startled and bewildered.  I began to see it everywhere.  The green sleeping bag under the bridge in downtown Kansas City.  The thousands of souls fleeing their homeland at all costs.  If they go, they may die, but if they stay, they certainly will.  Look at their desperation and dare to feel displacement. Just dare.

A sick baby is loaded in the car seat, because we have to go here and there, we can’t go home to snuggle on the couch, to notice every whimper, every little shudder from the chills.  One more stop until we return to this home of ours.  Half the walls are stripped bare. The floors are torn apart and exposed.  We’ll endure the construction and be intentional with simple and prepared meals.  We’ll enter more restaurants than usual.  There will be many challenges, but I cannot utter the word suffering. 

Suffering, I do not know.  The mother with a child in arms, carrying all that remains of their material belongings.  The baby is hungry, because there is no food or warmth or rest.  They must press onward. They must get on the train.  They must be let in the gates.  And the baby becomes sick, her cries are great, joining in the heart breaking chorus of the many who are broken and afraid, desperate with survival.  There is no rest in survival.  A little body burns with fever, but they trudge on in a place they are not welcome. Everything is unknown and bewildering.  The mother strokes her forehead, gives her a sip of water, from the bottle that is nearly empty.  Every drop matters.  Every step must be taken. There are long, staggering conversations considering the limited money in their pockets, a debate over lodging and food, travel or medicine.  One or the other? What can we forgo?  If we can just get there? If we can just…

Exhaustion seeps into every desperate word. All around them, the foreign and unwelcoming world does not care for the weeping small ones, for the strong and weary others pressing on for their lives.  Displacement is oozing and smells fowl.  It settles in and dulls shining eyes.  Embers of darkness and fear begin to glow. Who can be trusted? Not many.  Who will help us? Not many.  What will we do? I don’t know, but we have to try.

We unloaded the car and turned the key in the door.  A deep sigh acknowledged the reality of these next few weeks.  An exhaustion served atop the move half way across the country heaped on top of the process of it all.  I gave her medicine to ease her symptoms and placed her gently in bed.  My baby rests now, under her favorite blanket, next to the handmade bunny that we made in anticipation of her life and a teddy bear from daddy on the day we first saw her beautiful, big eyes.

I walked down the stairs to a mountain of boxes labeled kitchen. I do not know where to find the trash bags.  I can not find the kettle that will brew water for coffee, but in one cupboard that remains on the wall, someone was thoughtful enough to put our paper plates, plastic silverware, and the half empty bottle of spiced rum.  I laughed.  I put a simple lunch on paper plates and bring to my family.

Our inconvenience will feel great.  Yet, it is not suffering.  No. Suffering, can we even imagine theirs? Inconvenience is merely a rain drop in an ocean full of wandering souls with no place to return and no place to arrive. 

Emmanuel.

 

 

 

Trees on the edge

Hours pass and still the rolling patchwork fields of green rest under the bluest sky. A spilled container of marshmallow clouds is
scattered and hang far beyond what my eyes can see.   As the minutes tick away, tree lines are page breaks in the endless corn that stands tall slightly golden in the August sun.  My eyes catch silos and delight in grand old barns. There is something so incredibly disorienting about this space. The fields go on and on like markers on a map constantly announcing how we’re deep into uncharted land.  I’m certain change has never been so startling. 
Fences run along the interstate that once sliced through farmland in the name of progress.   Queen Anne’s Lace, Black-Eyed Susan's and a delicate purple flower  adorn the roadside.  The occasional cluster of bursting green trees on the edge of the fields stand boldly against the squares of sameness. I’m reminded of  the thin, spiny trees that grow with their roots exposed along the jagged cliffs of the Great Smoky Mountains, the Eastern Redbud with its pale lavender blossoms that softly hang in juxtaposition to the dark shadowy lines of rigid rock.
The trees on the edge express a language that I understand the most.  I welcome their presence in this season, like a dear friend standing in solidarity.   I feel the vulnerability of the winds that sweep across the vastness and the rattling that reaches so deep. I feel known.
As we drove all around Kansas City this past weekend,  my eyes caught sight of a bedroll and backpack high in an underpass of the busy interstate.  I’ve seen it before, countless times, especially in Los Angeles, but that green sleeping bag is still vivid in my mind. And as we drove away, I lingered in the stark air of displacement. Place is such a powerful character in our story. It’s been three weeks and I haven’t a clue where I really am.  I can tell you the zip code. I know that if you take two simple turns out of the neighborhood, town is just down the road, but I’m lost somewhere in this setting of fields and farms under the great open sky.
I picture a farmer gazing out at his land, a plot of earth so familiar.  Knowing where the sun will burst forth each morning and the silhouette of the trees that it will illuminate.  Aware of how all the living things tilt when the winds blow from the west or the habits of a summer storm. His eyes detect when the fields reach the perfect hue of harvest.  His connection to the land so sacred and true. In this great world, he has found his place. And where he finds belonging, I feel an expanse of uncertainty and bewilderment. 
Far from the edge, where the sea roars and greets my wild.  Distant from the rising and majestic mountains that reach high to heaven.  The sky feels bigger here exposing every hope and fear. The winds sweep over the land demanding surrender.  I cannot stand in this place unaffected.  It’s terrifying out here in the open.
And I’m ready to consider that the home I seek cannot be found.
To be continued…

the one with grace

We sat on the deck as the sun dipped below the trees and farther still.  The air was warm and not heavy.  Four green Adirondack chairs were arranged in an oval and the baby, the one who is eager to grab a hand and stretch those little wobbly wings crossed back and forth.  

It’s been a day.  A two hour attempt to remove tiny splinters from the hand of a six year old boy, who is as still and stubborn as Everest  Another day of that whole unsettled game, where the kids ask when we’ll go home and where is our new home. How do we really make them understand time and the process of it all.  Their questions turn up the volume on our own, where is our new home and when will we get there.  How do we begin all over again? The temporary housing isn’t bad, ever so sweetened by adoring grandparents, but is the loss of home already such a strong feeling at ages four and six and one. The flood of emotions is constant as the sea with high tide and low tide.  Help me Jesus, it’s been mostly high tide these days. 

I think we always forget this part, because a portion of us is always dangling in this semi-uprooted existence, while softened by the rhythms of our days which play out within the walls filled with our things and ways. However, for our babies not yet plagued with the gift of the restless adventurer, there’s no place for those feelings to go, so we catch them, and keep them afloat the best we can while treading water.  

We went to the beach one last time before leaving the East coast and the waves were so beautifully fierce that we had to clutch their wrists with all our might to keep them from folding into the power of the waters that pulled upon the shore.  It’s like that, but if we are honest, the waves shake our footing, too.

We forge on with eternal optimism because what else would we do, there is no other way to play the roles we’ve been given, that blessing curse that beckons us onward.  Hoping that the emotions of now three young children will go easy on us.  Surely, they won’t, but we’ll make it through. We’ll make it through, we always do.  Surely, we’ll do it again, right? 

All that and it’s only just bedtime.  Three kids who woke early and barely napped must be wrangled into bed, all in the same room. 

Will you read us a story? He asks, you know I was kind of hoping to skip it. Will you read us a Jesus story?  He asks, not well enough versed in the rhetoric to call it a Bible story.  I like it better that way, don’t you, because don’t all the stories point to Jesus. Even the story of today with its trials and heavy clouds of growth and faith.  Especially those.

Sometimes when I read their children’s bible, the poetry of the words catch me off guard and I almost feel him reaching out to us.  Adam and Eve were sent from the garden, that perfect home, propelling all of humanity on a painful journey, catapulting us into an existence of searching for home where our hearts are whole again.  Now all our days and labor and yearning and creativity cry out to the only one who holds that which we seek.  Sure, they disobeyed God and trusted the snake, but this human story is no tragedy, because all our wanderings are marked with this, I am with you, wherever you go. 

I finished reading. The baby was already asleep, how exhausted she must be.  I sat on the edge of his bed until his eyes were small slivers.

 But, mama, how come we can’t see God?  Where is he? 

Well, baby, he’s everywhere. 

But, how? 

I don’t really know, but I know he’s so big and so great that he’s everywhere. 

You mean, he’s by the ocean and the jungle and in America? And outer space? You said he was in the waves, but we can’t see him?

I told them how there are special places where we can see and feel God the most.  I told them that there will be a special place where they may not be able to explain it, but will feel God so close that seeing isn’t important.  I said that God has a special story for you to live and it’s going to be wonderful and brave and creative.  I told them I can’t wait to see what that story is.

What will that story be, mama?

I don’t really know, but you’ll see.

The dark room was silent, two little heads with eyes half open, fully alight with a world of thoughts more radiant than the sun. One little baby in footy pajamas closing out day 364 of her sweet life.  I could have kissed their heads and left the room, but I didn’t dare move from the presence that needed no introduction.  No one spoke for minutes or was it seconds?

I don’t really know what that story will be, mama, but I think it will be good.

Grace clutches our wrists, as we take those first wobbly steps. Grace holds us in the crashing waves and carries us through the story.  I don’t really know what the story will be, but I think it will be good.