One Thousand Places to Call Home

Here’s a secret: I don’t know how to write about home.

From the other side of the window, we silently watch the robin flitter to and from the lilac tree. We don’t dare move. Disturb the assiduous bird and she’d be gone, abandoning the half-finished nest in place of a more secluded location, away from our prying eyes.

The robin and her partner carry blades of dried grass and twigs in their beaks. Her red breast is sullied with mud as they spend the day building her nest. They sing to each other as they work. HEE-wow-HEE-wow-HEE-wow. My daughter imitates the series of cheery warbling from behind the windowpane, her palms and forehead flattened against the glass.

We couldn’t believe our luck. While visiting my parents’ house last summer, we watched a duck lay and incubate her clutch in the front yard. Now this year, back at my parents’ house again, we get front-row seats to a robin doing the same.

After the robins have finished their work, we slip out onto the deck, eager to see the newly-constructed nest. And even though my daughter is far too big, I pull her onto my hip so she can get a better view. On the tips of my toes and with the extra weight of a three-year-old threatening to throw off my balance, I lean over the deck railing. We’ve got to see this ordinary miracle unfolding in the backyard.  

Deep in the lilac tree, the robin’s perfectly round nest is fixed securely to the branches. She has carefully woven the twigs together, over and under and through, creating a home. 

“Hey, we should bring Baba here sometime,” my daughter says to me about her dad, pulling the storm door open and walking back into my parents’ house. We reluctantly decided to give the robin some privacy after her hard work.

She says it offhandedly, like the thought just occurred to her, but her simple comment causes me to pause. I bend down to meet her eyes, brushing her curls off her face, both of us perching on the door's threshold. 

Because she is still only three and because the external circumstances of our life have already brought about so much uncertainty, I don’t tell her the details of why her dad is not here with us on this side of the world or how the decisions of other people and policies beyond our control prevent him from getting on the plane with us. I don’t tell her how we have won the great lottery of birth and hold the right kind of passports, how he does not.  

So, instead I say, Oh, my love, he should be here, too. He’d love to see the robin.

An ocean away, in our home in Turkey, we have a kids' science book titled “Sturdy Turtles". My daughter and husband will read it together most mornings, curled up in the armchair. Instead of reading the facts on each page, my husband narrates his own, assigning funny thoughts to the turtles in various situations. That one is thinking hard about his debts, he says of a turtle who is half-submerged in shallow water. This one is tired from going to the bar with his friends last night. He points to another, who suns himself on a rock, eyes closed. 

“Debts.” “Bar.” My daughter tries out the words, matching my husband’s serious, matter-of-fact tone. One of her arms is slung over his shoulders. The sides of their foreheads touch.

There is one page in the book that shows a map of North America. Red tick marks across the continent indicate which areas have turtles. They take a moment to study the map, my husband pointing and saying, “Your grandma and grandpa live here. Your other grandma lives up there.” 

“And we live,” my daughter drags her finger heavily across the map, off the book, and into the air in front of her, “all the way over here.”

The days roll on, and we become slightly obsessed with the robin.¹ Multiple times, we walk over to the deck, gingerly pushing the branches aside to check her nest. It’s empty for a few days, and we wonder if the robin’s timing was off. Maybe she built it too early. Maybe she wasn’t carrying eggs at all. Maybe we scared her off, and she has long since abandoned her nest.

Maybe we’d missed the miracle.

Reportedly, only about 1 in 4 nests are “successful”, which is defined as producing at least one hatched chick that can fledge. So our doubts aren’t entirely unfounded. With a mere twenty-five percent chance of laying and hatching her brood, the odds are not quite in the robin’s favor.

But then one morning, an egg appears. The next day, another appears. The third day, another. Three delicate, soft blue eggs lay cradled in the center nest. The sunshine of early summer casts dappled light across the trio. 

We wait.

I go downstairs to my parents’ basement where three large suitcases and a carry-on are all splayed open at my feet. 

After six weeks of visiting home in the U.S., it’s time for my daughter and me to fly back to our other home six thousand miles from here. I’m savoring the time with my family because I know the days when we are all under one roof are finite. The arms that received us at the airport six weeks ago will now release us as we fly back across the Atlantic.

It’s a strange thing, packing for the coming year ahead. Making sure my daughter has enough clothes for the winter and trying to predict her shoe size by spring. I pack a few easy chapter books because I have a feeling she’ll be interested in longer read-alouds soon. I fit Christmas linens and fall-scented candles in the pockets of our suitcases. 

All these things and I don’t even know where in the world we’ll be when it is time to use them. 

These two places on opposite ends of the earth are embodied here on the floor of my parents’ basement, me trying to fit one home into my other home. 

In the hustle and bustle of swimming lessons and gymnastics and trips to the splash pad (all things that aren’t as accessible in Turkey), the robin kind of slipped our mind. Once she laid her eggs, she started sitting on her brood day after day. We wanted to give her space, so we stopped jabbing our hands into the lilac tree to look at her nest. We kept our distance, and the days continued to roll by. 

But then three days before we boarded the plane: Fluttering back and forth. Tiny chirps. A new, stronger call from the throat of the robin. 

Three little, mottled chicks lay folded on top of each other in the nest. 

Life, in all its vulnerabilities and messiness, had cracked wide open. 

More than likely this wasn’t the robin’s first go-around at building a nest. Typically, robins will do this two times a breeding season, building a new nest for each new brood. Sometimes even three times. And if it is a particularly good year, they may even build a fourth nest stretching late into the summer. The robin will finesse her nest building with each brood, getting more efficient each time.

A kind woman at my parents’ church catches me after the service a day before we leave. Sitting next to each other in the emptying rows of the sanctuary, she asks me a question I don't know how to answer. 

 “Where is home for you?”

The question takes me by surprise, and I stutter out a vague reply, feeling like a wide-eyed lost child trying to find their mom in a department store. 

Building a home and making it look like how I want it to while living in this liminal space is hard. Motherhood while stretching over an ocean is hard. 

Here’s a secret: I don’t know how to write about home or how to answer that question. Home is a complicated thing to define, some nameless longing always swishing around in my heart, always changing shape. Before I can get a grasp on it, home once again morphs into something different and slips away.

I wish I didn’t know the strain of juggling two different places across the ocean from each other. I wish I only knew roots and stability and long-term planning.²

I used to think 'home' was a physical place, a well-built structure with four walls and a roof. Well, I have two, I once thought, dragging a metaphorical finger in the air. One here and one all the way over there.   

But the more I’ve lived in the tension of straddling these two places, trying to pull them together with each hand, struggling to stretch each leg across the ocean, the more I’m learning home isn’t necessarily about a physical place. There is beauty in this reality, too.  

I look to the robin who so confidently constructs her home over and over again, perfecting her skills each time she builds a nest, getting better and quicker, each nest getting rounder and studier. 

My homes are constructed in a thousand different places: in the predictability of the same brown coffee cup my dad sets out every morning for me on our visit and in the smell of my mom’s chocolate chip cookies cooling on the counter. I find homes in the quiet of the evening, eating watermelon with my husband on our balcony, and curling up with a stack of books (the ones we’ve lugged in a carry-on across the ocean) with my three-year-old, kissing the top of her head. My home is built on the couch in an old friend’s apartment, belly laughing over iced coffees until tears stream down our cheeks. My homes are created by the woman at church who squeezes my arm and asks how things are going and the woman in our neighborhood who hands us plums from her garden each time we walk past. My homes are constructed with the muddy branches of tears and hopes, threaded together by so many messy, shaky prayers.

There is grief and sadness in each of these, yes. But there is also hidden beauty in building a home in so many different places and with so many different people.

May there be grace to carry it all. 

1. I think here is a good time to share this, if you are into nerdy nature humor like me. Tag yourself. I’m the vogelkop bowerbird.

2. House fever, anyone?