Places, Things, Sounds and Smells

I love it here, I love our decision to change our lives and I love it's effect on our family, on our marriage for certain. We are closer, we are more understanding and we are more compassionate. But how and just exactly when did we get to this place?

We've only been here six months. We chose neither this country, this city, nor this home, yet this house feels like home, these fruit trees feel like they've been ours since they were seedlings, our garden under the watchful eye of a tropical sun and Sam's careful afternoon waterings, seem to have been here much longer.

And I wonder as I often have in my life, where along the road, and I wish I could pinpoint when though I suspect it happens gradually and that you only realize it in one instant, when and how it all began to feel familiar.

With the commonplace sound of yet another jet landing over our barrel tile roof at Brasilia International Airport, I am unexpectedly taken back to when the faces glued to the tiny oval windows of that plane, were ours. How different everything looked. Nothing familiar, everything new. Our senses turned to ninjas the second the rubber hit the tarmak as they always do when we are put in an unfamiliar place.

Roads we drove home on from the airport just a half a year ago seemed so foreign we could have been driving on the moon our sense of direction was turned into a spinning compass. We were overwhelmed by humidity. Our eyes were desperate to adjust to the light of our first Brazilian morning after a night spent in a dimly lit fuselage. The sound of Paul's most familiar and comforting voice speaking for the first time, a language I had never heard spoken outside of a classroom. The musty smells of embassy vans headed God.Knows.Where.

Our new home. You know the smell, the one that greets you after a long vacation, it often isn't the sight of the place that brings you that first sigh of relief "ah home" it is the very first essence of the place that puts your heart at rest. Now try to remember that smell from the very first day you walked in your home. We tried to make it familiar fast, but it didn't come easily. Day after day we arrived and when the smell greeted me, it was almost sickeningly wrong to call this smell home....until it wasn't, and now I can't remember how it used to smell. Just a custom blend of my babies, my laundry, my cooking and my stuff.

As simple as the change in a midwinter's flight pattern, I am reminded that we are never far from where we came. That life will always begin to feel familiar again and no matter how hard you squint your eyes and try to see that place as home, you will never make it happen. It will just grasp you gently by the heart one day and you'll wonder when those streets became your town, when those trees became your yard, when those smells became your family.

We'll do it all again, perhaps sooner than we'd like. Who would we be if we didn't have a love for things familiar? Inhuman, I am sure. But someone else, who you'll want to dub the "Gods of the Foreign Service" but I believe are the Gods of something else, will choose our next country, city and home and it will all begin a new again. Until one day I'm driving in my car down some road, in a country I am not from and a city that is not my own....and I will be home again. \

Elise