Art and shiny things…
I’ve spent a whole lifetime
trying to explain what homesickness feels like
inside my body, but when I open my mouth
I say your name.
Hannah Nahar , One Sentence Poems
This hit me right in the gut – it’s so rare as a third-culture kid to find someone who can put into words what you’ve been feeling your whole life..amazing.
I learned these strangers and their families
wandering and returning.
We once outraced a hail storm pulling
the bleaching laundry off the southern terrace.
One day at table our older son surprised
himself in accidental fluency
by asking aqua per favore, might I.
-from “The Days of August Leapt, One Over the Other,” by Judith Baumel, Barrow Street
I’m fascinated by other worlds and other cultures, having grown up a TCK, and Morocco is high on my list to visit.
(Climb in, climb out of the little black square) The village rises into form amidst the pines. Cows and goats stand unstunned in the forest. The Muslim and Christian quarters are made of flimsy wood and storage containers. Assemble, disassemble. There is a military technology fair in Orlando where you can purchase a village in a box. Then populate it: live inside it for a time. At the beginning of the exercise, the soldier students are told half-truths. They must stabilize who and why. While playing market, Nafeesa and Ralia cry out leblabi leblabi, to the soldiers. It is that roasted chickpea soup they sell in paper cones in the Middle East. “Win a- leblabi, u ashgid?” (Where is the leblabi and how much?), I ask. They are so shocked that they give me a Coke.
So in love with this gorgeous looping spiral of a poem from Nomi Stone.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is one of my favorite romantic novels of all time, I consider it a successor to Pride and Prejudice, so obviously I’m interested in a webseries adaptation of it. It’s a little unassuming but very cute so far, and I’m dying of curiosity to see who they cast as Thornton. Also, as a third culture kid, I completely identity with Margaret’s culture shock here.
(Madang, Morobe Province)
Every year from May to July I get a humming in my bones. Somewhere between an ache and a pull, a sensation that I can’t quite feel but is always there, like a sound just above the human ability to register. It’s a longing to go home. Or perhaps more specifically and also more generally, a longing for the tropics.
The seasons change between May and July – everything turns slowly to summer. And in that in-between place, as the temperature shifts to a bold blaze of heat but the moisture from spring is still in the air and everything seems to be vibrating yet holding still in place, not quite ready to be in the midst of steady summer heat – it’s than that it feels like New Guinea. And Honolulu. Every place I’ve been in the tropics, for eight weeks or so in the United States as the temperature turns it feels like that.
I’d always get restless, in college and later, at a certain point in the year. It took me a long time to realize when, and why. But it seems to intensify and get worse with every year since I left New Guinea – a pull that creeps up slowly and stays as spring shifts to summer.
And I get this insane urge to make my way somewhere tropical, preferably home, but anywhere really that resembles it, that can promise it, this heavy air, this tease of tropical heat, the warm ocean and the humming of cicadas and or other insects, slow winds in palm trees, the smell of hibiscus and a faint scent of saltwater…anywhere with these conditions. I’ve been dreaming of Hawaii, lately – because home is so inaccessible. Can almost feel it sometimes around the corner, hitting me on a warm afternoon here in the Northwest as I leave an air-conditioned office and the weather can be felt, alive like a slowly shifting beast.
When you leave home, they never tell you that it will be the weather that will make you the most homesick.
I miss sea and saltwater and and especially humidity and a wild green manifesting itself firmly everywhere. Saudade, is what they call it.
Coffee and Irony 