Trips back home (Extended)
From a little place in the fjords of Iceland called Fáskrúðsfjörður. Not necessarily “home” but it certainly felt like it when I took a tour around Iceland with friends in 2018.
Summer is in full swing. In fact, a better part of June is now memory and, like most summers that have gone before while working with our boys from home, it’s hard to believe time drifts forward rapidly.
Mind drift
Maybe it’s having the boys in tow for the summer or this season of life I’m in. I’ve found myself, in moments between things, when my mind finds a place to rest, drifting to memories of my own childhood. Does that ever happen to you? Current environments, sounds, smells, even video games trigger memories and send you on a visit to another time? Through personal experience and just as often through discussions with my clients I find many around this season of life (or thereafter) have a growing awareness of their formative years. I imagine, although I’ve not taken the time to research this, that it’s a common occurrence for your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s & beyond to be filled with connecting dots to make sense of who you are, how you got here and what you want to do with your numbered days in existence. Not to get so serious so fast, but I’m not afraid of a little emotional intensity.
As I’ve done some of this exploring and prodding in my own life the last few years I’ve seen a pattern of choices and gravitational pulls back to some formative and “safe” times throughout formative times of my life. Although it’s not necessarily a rule and I hate the precedent the word “normal” evokes, I think many of us attempt to recreate adapted and even improved environments from our formative years when we’re older.
And it kinda make sense, to me, at least. A sense of self starts to emerge at some point during our young development and I’ve begun to wonder if the environment in which we felt safe to explore those things gets etched into our brains. So, in the more advanced stages of life, when we feel permission to re-explore, many (not all) of us have a place & time when we felt free and safe and the autonomy to explore. We bring that with us when we set about creating the life we want for ourselves now. To create. To understand. To fuel curiosity. To be.
For the purposes of becoming more self-aware and continuing the work of creating a home & environment centered around life’s most important things I think we can learn a thing or two by being attentive to what we see, hear and notice when we revisit those memories. Maybe it could prove helpful as we’re trying to create a sense of home in the places we spend the most time? It’s worth a try! I explore an exercise that’s been helpful for me and you can find it in a much abbreviated version of this journal posted HERE.
Field Trips back home
I’ve found myself thinking a lot the last few months & weeks about summers when I’d got visit my dad and my step mom. My mom & my dad divorced when I was young. I actually don’t have much memory of them being together so I’m not exactly sure when they separated but I do know that from around 2nd grade on most summers I’d go with my older brother, my younger brother and my sister for long weekends or even a full week with my dad. He lived (and still lives) in the Eastern part of Missouri, an hour, or so, south of St. Louis. About three and a half hours away from where I lived with my mom, step-dad and the rest of the brood. I could still tell you how to get there.
The trip wasn’t exactly a straight shot along interstates. We’d start across the toll bridge into Southern Illinois and weave through little towns & villages, county roads and city streets all the way to the hills of South Eastern Missouri. I can still see the faces of the 2 or 3 toll workers who usually worked the booth. The Kentucky Fried Chicken I always hoped we’d stop at and sometimes did. I can hear the country music playing on the radio; Dwight Yokum, Reba McEntire, The Judds. Looking back now I’m sure my dad and step mom had stations memorized to change between along the route as soon one of them went out of range during the 3.5 hour drive. They must’ve worn through dozens of tires, a tanker full of gas and logged thousands upon thousands of miles in the years they made those treks to pick us up and bring us home.
The shop & the rock house
Once we got to Missouri and depending on our length of stay we’d sometimes spend time with my grandma & grandpa at their shop while my dad was at work. My dad lived with my grandparents for several years and for a good part of my childhood and while my grandpa was still alive he and my grandma owned a business called First Town Taxi. The town they opened has claim (I’m not sure how true it is, I’ve never checked) to be the first town settled West of the Mississippi, hence the name. Their shop was in a strip mall along with other shops; a Dollar General, a grocery store and a handful of other small businesses. The front of the shop was lined with windows. My grandparents shop was a good enough size for my grandmother to also have a decent portion of the space designated to seamstress work. She’d do everything from hemming trousers to crafting dresses for entire wedding parties and several things in between. I remember thimbles, packages of clothing templates, spools of thread, a small pile of pin cushions, the hum of a sewing machine and the concentrated look on my grandmother’s face when she was hard at work. Seeing her face now I can tell how much she loved her work.
Just off the main work area was a space along the front of the building my grandparents created for us to play while they worked. It wasn’t a big room, The massive front window was covered by drapes my grandmother made and there was a TV with a Nintendo and maybe a few other things to keep us occupied. While we were there we’d hear people come in the shop to get measurements for alterations or pick up/drop off things my grandmother was working on. We’d hear the phone ring when my grandpa got a call for another run.
In the evenings when the shop closed, we’d drive to the rock house where my grandparents lived outside a nearby village. It was a winding drive home through the country, past creek beds lined with river rock, thick forests and miles upon miles of hills. This iconic (to me) house sat at the top of a slow hill with a small chicken farm behind it and a gravel driveway to the left lined with the most beautifully mature mimosa trees. Inside the kitchen was the heart of my grandmother’s rock house. My most vivid memories are of her cooking in the kitchen and my grandpa coming in, casually flirting and then they’d bust out dancing to something playing on the radio right there in the center of the kitchen. For me, it was the stuff dreams were made of.
Artifacts
I could tell you the most mundane details of that house. The way their couch brown velvet(ish) fabric felt with the wagon wheel country pattern. The paneling on the walls. My dads small record collection and the tapestry on bedroom wall. The smell of my grandfather’s cigars and how he and my dad smelled when they’d just gotten home from work. How to get to find the pond just down the road where we’d go fishing and the spot in the field just before that was the best place to hop the fence to get to it. How the water and the pebbles felt on my bare feet in the creek bed just a few short miles away and the route we’d have to take when the creeks overflowed blocking our way home.
I find myself noticing and even reaching for artifacts I see that remind me of this place and time in my life. And I’m wondering if you find yourself doing the same? All the taste, smell, texture, sight and sound that filled this space in my formative years. As I attempt to run a small business with my kids in tow during the summer just like my grandparents did I think about what that must’ve been like for them. And feeling some of the same pressures I’m sure my dad felt - trying to make his way, trying to do things right, failing and getting back up - I wonder if he found himself revisiting his childhood dreaming of things being just a little more simple, too. If he and my grandparents wanted time to slow down to savor the moment for just a little bit longer. Just like I find myself doing.
I know many men and women waste years and hours chasing after an illusory ideal. Trying to refabricate their best recollection of how things were. For me, a time of safety stands immensely vivid among much of my memory that’s clouded with so much uncertainty, fear (even terror at times) and just feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere. I can see that better now that I’m older and I didn’t know it then. The task that feels most present before me now is being attentive to our boys and how they’re seeing the world; in all it’s beauty & terror. Attempting (and sometimes failing) to approach each day with a sense of curiosity and wonder and teaching them how to do the same. I have a hunch, although I’m not entirely sure, that it’s through that work I’ll continue to be a student of past and future self. Of which the job is never really done.
