We started around the corner of West and Hortense. There’s a eucalyptus tree I've walked past hundreds of times. As if by instinct, I looked up at it as we passed. It danced with the wind against the bright blue sky the way it always does on afternoons in Southern California. The air smelled like fall, like back-to-school mornings, and trick-or-treat nights. The setting sun beat through the magnolia trees, the freshly mowed lawns smelled only the way freshly mowed lawns can, and school bells rang their afternoon song. Suddenly, I was back—walking to school with friends, coming too fast down the street corners on my razor scooter, getting nervous when we passed the cute boy’s house on family walks after dinner. 

This is the home that built me.

It’s the home that watched me grow from girl to grownup, the home that held me through my first heartbreaks, and the home I came back to in the summers. It’s the home that taught me where the utensils go and where the pots and pans should be. It’s the home that was the backdrop to it all—the best and the worst of every memory.

But now, I can only remember the good stuff—which is easy to do when you’ve been so far away for so long. I spent months trying hard not to daydream about this return trip. But as soon as the tickets were in our hands, I couldn’t stop myself. I imagined how it would feel to hug my dad. I daydreamed about what I would say when I saw family at the airport. I fantasized, as best I could, how an In-N-Out burger would taste.

But to my surprise, it wasn’t how I pictured it would be. It wasn’t worse or lackluster or disappointing, just…different. Familiar, but somehow foreign.

Nothing was coated in glitter. The first hugs lingered but normalness quickly settled in—even though it was anything but normal. And I felt the pull of a way of life I’d left behind: a proclivity for pleasing people, a bent toward overspending, a tendency to slip into anxiety. 

The same girl that ran up and down these cul-de-sacs, that left for prom from this front lawn, that tried so hard to be who everyone wanted her to be, was not the same girl now: pushing a double stroller up the hill, telling a toddler to shield her eyes from the harsh California sun, having traveled halfway around the world from the place she now calls home.  

__________

7,695 miles east, Nepal is just about as far away as you can get from Southern California. Home is down a stone-laid road off of a busy street where bicycling fruit vendors hug ivy-covered walls, with motorbikes, pedestrians, trucks, and buses all fighting for a turn down the narrow road. Would you grimace if I told you the two-year-old learned to ride her bike on this road? She stays on the yellow line, between us and the ivy wall. She maneuvers around sleeping street dogs and says “namaste” to the ones who stare at her red hair and fair, freckle-flecked skin.

“Do you like it here or there,” people often ask me. 

Five and a half years later, I’m still surprised to hear myself say, “here.”  

Here where doors are rarely locked and meetings rarely planned. Here where the faithful sing their songs loudly and pray their prayers boldly. Here where our girls were born, where our friends are,where tea is a rhetorical question and no one is ever not invited.

Here is where we’ve grown a life. This is the home that’s building me. 

The longer we stay, the less I can imagine leaving. The more the years go by, the more this place and its ways overwrite what I thought I knew about life and people and God. 

And about myself.

Patience has replaced expectation. People have become a priority over time. Clocks are suggestive and less helpful than they were. I’ve learned to linger, to wait for the right moment and not assume which one is the right one. And I’ve found God is nearer than I’d ever learned he was, working through the threads of everything we say and do, constantly calling us nearer still. 

__________

A porch swing and a glass of tea. A sky wide and vast, purpling with the onset of the evening. Fireflies hovering on the grass and a sweet Tennessee breeze filling the silence. 

There’s something about this place. It’s not home. It’s never been home. But it feels like home.

We come here every time we visit the States to see my husband’s dad. It’s an interruption to the chaos of the familiar back in California, where our calendars fill fast and there’s a no with every yes. Here, there is no one to see except each other. Here, everything is yes.

Here, where a toddler runs through backwoods chasing rabbits and stomps in giant piles of autumn leaves. Here, where tea is sweet and conversation is slow. Here, where nothing is familiar but everything is possible. Here, where home is all the things that could be. 

An unknown and foggy future that normally feels daunting feels less so from here—swinging on the front porch, watching thick clouds join together, reflecting off the glassy lake. The world feels big and scary, but Tennessee feels rich and welcoming. 

When I’m in Tennessee, I want things I’ve never wanted before. I want to walk among the dark green forests beyond the lake, filled with tall, old trees covered in vines and invasive species. I want to go for long, slow drives and stare at the bright, rolling hills rushing through the windows—a house appearing every now and again. 

But this isn’t my reality, and that could be the very thing that makes it so appealing. What isn’t has a way of inspiring in us a longing for what should be. Every day, every moment should be as sweet and delightful as an autumn afternoon on a porch in East Tennessee. We should feel as deeply rooted as the old oak trees that line the highway. We should be as unmoved as the Cherokee lake at dusk.

I’ll take these longings home with me—the desires for what was and what could be—and I’ll use them to make what is a little more special. 

Mom’s recipes and dad’s country music.
A Tennesseean’s habit for front porch sittin’ and neighborly wavin’.
The Nepali tendency to linger and leave doors open.

A nomadic heart is forever at home and never at home all at the same time. We’re always settling where we can, while also searching for something more—
something more exquisite
something closer to perfect. 

But we’re also quite good at making do with what we’ve got—sinking deep into the joy of what is and what was, knowing it’s not half as good as what is yet to come. 

Photo by Andrey Petrov on Unsplash