#canwegohomeagain

[lyingdownwithdogs]

Coddiwomple

My mother’s heart is beginning to fail.

An enigma to the end, Betty is at home, just a week before her 91st birthday, still living alone and communicating little about the life she has lived. She is bent and frail but still getting up every morning and going about her day as she has since our rather large family moved into that little house in Omaha 49 years ago. Toast and tea for breakfast with perhaps a single egg. Wash the dishes. Watch the news. Wait for the mail. No more children to keep up with or clean up after; even her grandchildren are grown now and nearly all of us have chosen to live elsewhere.

Her condition is a degeneration of the heart valve, they tell us and “it’s a matter of time”. My niece, Rachel, drove her last week to a scheduled doctor’s visit & learned then she had felt shortness of breath for a week. Not wanting to “bother anyone” she waited for her Monday appointment to point out this little detail. An overnight stay in the hospital ensued and a battery of tests confirmed her doctor’s hunch.  They adjusted her medication and she was instructed to go home and rest. Not likely with this one. She was up and at her regular routine the same day. Given the choice, I guess I would likely do the same; I would much rather die in my tracks doing something I love than lying around waiting for the inevitable.

When I think of my mother, in my mind’s eye she is almost always in motion. Cooking. Cleaning. In the garden. We beg her to sit with us and she does so but uncomfortably for just a few minutes and then she is up again. Only at the end of the day can I picture her at rest, sitting in the kitchen alone, sipping a cup of hot tea. I started for a moment when I overheard one of my staff members describing me similarly just a few days ago. The statement was called in my direction so that I would intentionally hear it:  “Sharon is always moving. She never sits still…”

I admit that description also fits me in a broader sense as well. I’ve spent recent weeks considering my next professional step. At the end of my 50’s I’m still posing to which region of the country I might relocate to start some new project. Could I handle Northern winters again and be closer to my sons? There is the draw of Oregon wine country, or I could think more realistically and find my way closer to my sister in Texas. Not getting any younger…

Another option is to get off the merry-go-round and actually put down roots where I am, in the Mid-Atlantic. Would it be such a crazy idea to stay in one place for a change? I have family here too, enjoy the climate, jobs are plentiful, I like the proximity to great cities and have begun to immerse myself in the storied history of the region. In fact, there are days I feel as though I’m living in an eerily familiar place, as if touching a certain door handle or stone wall might trigger some deep memory hidden in my DNA and expose a clearer association to the past. I spend my days off wandering the countryside, walking revolutionary cobblestones and attempting to decipher the writing on faded headstones as if I’m trying to connect to someplace or something specific, but what?

When people ask me where I’m from, a common enough question to one who has recently relocated, I tend to stumble over my reply. “I’m an Air Force brat”, I answer, “I’m not really from anywhere” and that is true in a sense. Growing up in a large military family, we moved from bases in Northern California to South Dakota to Southern California and Eastern Montana before finally settling in Omaha, Nebraska, all before I was 10. My oldest brother, Tom, ten years my senior, never spent two years in the same school throughout his upbringing. As a child, I never got the sense that we were rooted anywhere. There were family stories of course, but mostly I felt we were just here, now, wherever we went. Perhaps to my children’s detriment, I never stopped moving. Though they grew up in Minnesota in general, there is no one place they can point to as “home”; no family touchstone. For seven years I worked at a job where I traveled away from home for days or months at a time. I still think of those Minnesota northern lakes and pines as dearest to my heart of any one place, but home? Not anymore.

I recently moved to a new apartment, actually a suite in the comfortable Virginia home of friends, some of the first people I met when I relocated near Washington, DC two years ago. While tidying up yesterday, I took a look around and admired the space for a moment and became conscious of something for the first time. I have some type of map on every wall of my apartment: a huge map of the Caribbean over the fireplace, one of the few possessions I brought east with me; a reproduction map of Fauquier County that I bought while exploring with my nephews last summer; a long, hand drawn, horizontal map of the old Snickersville Turnpike that I found on a countryside excursion into Loudon County last summer; and one new piece, a 6 inch wide and 40 inch long map of the Mississippi River. My newest treasure, discovered in a shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans while standing 2 blocks from the Great River at its widest point. I spent 10 years living just an hour south of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, the source of the Mississippi. I have waded across the tiny outlet from the lake, six or eight feet wide and knee deep, a creek that winds its way out of that obscure northern lake to become one of the mightiest rivers in the world.  

As that odd bit of decorative repetition struck me, so did something else. I have spent two years digging into Ancestry.com connecting dots in my lineage, have been virtually obsessed with spending my days off not just exploring the area but specifically on historic site visits and as I pondered the maps on every wall of my apartment I had to ask myself, are you searching for something? On the table beneath that thin, vertical plot of the Mississippi sits a framed quote from Tolkien's ‘Lord of the Rings’, “Not all those who wander are lost” and the banner on my Facebook page is not a photo currently but a definition: “Coddiwomple – to travel in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination”. I have literally encircled myself with markers that reveal my search for something from the past. But, a search for what?

Is there some inherited longing to return “home” to the east, passed down through six generations? I learned that my father’s branch of the family left other family members behind in North Carolina and started over; first in Indiana, then a generation later in Iowa and finally the Nebraska Panhandle.  I find it odd that I moved to Virginia without knowing until very recently that I am just a handful of hours from that North Carolina family homestead settled in the 1700’s and that my lineage includes enslaved women and men from that time and place.

My mother is also from the east coast but has always been curiously silent about her ancestry. We have the basics; Irish immigrants who entered through New York and migrated south to Kentucky and Georgia, her parents eventually moving to Florida, but she has intentionally withheld details about their lives. At first she states that she “does not know” or “does not remember” but when pressed, flatly refuses to speak of it and states, “Maybe those people don’t want you to know about them” and the conversation is over.  

Is there some great family secret she will choose to take to her grave, or does she simply believe it a frivolous pursuit? Is my childhood feeling of being not from anywhere taught vs. perceived? Is my ‘rolling stone’ life a continuation of what I saw as normal in my childhood or something more?

If it is, I have embraced it. I cannot fathom her life; after living for 25 years in military bases across the US, staying in the same home, living in what I see as the constraints of the same routine for another 50 years.

I am driven somehow to keep moving, to keep exploring, to keep searching, perhaps for some mirror of myself in history; like a ghost in the shadows of an old house, longing to once again touch what is clouded by the advance of time.  I feel in my heart that there is some purpose to my journey, but is that true or fantasy? If I come across the place or object of my desire, will I recognize it? 

Lives rarely end neatly, with resolution to past transgressions and all questions answered. Mine certainly will not, nor will my mother’s. Maybe I wish to touch some physical proof of the place where we started as a family, to walk it forward and come to some understanding of the journey taken; the courage and the missteps and mishaps that brought us to this generation. If it is possible to take the journey backward and come to some feeling of purpose about this family puzzle, might I be content to plant my feet and finally feel I can create a home of my own?