Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

family

Belonging

Driving home from work one day, I passed two vehicles from our local fire company. While I was stopped at the stop sign, I waved to the driver of the fire truck, a man we attend church with, and I was struck with this sense of feeling like I belonged. There we were, two people of thousands in the community, and our paths crossed and we acknowledged each other.

Two days earlier, our family made a spontaneous decision to go out to eat after church because it was Veterans Day and some local restaurants were offering free meals to veterans. I had just finished a weeks-long eating experiment so we hadn’t been out much, and we like to treat my husband to freebies like this for his service in Iraq a lifetime ago. My family slid into the booth and I went to the bathroom and on the way back, I recognized one of the servers.

“What are you doing here?” she asked at the same time I said, “Are you serving my family?” She had just walked away from our booth. We both were left shaking our heads because although we see each other often during the week as co-workers (she’s a student teacher), obviously we didn’t expect to bump into each other outside of the school where we spend so much time.

The day before that, I saw a friend at an event our sons were both participating in. We mostly interact online and only see each other occasionally in person. Our kids attend different school districts, so this, too, felt like belonging.

I used to think things like this were no big deal. In fact, I expected to run into people wherever I went. (Maybe you are wondering why I am making such a big deal out of this.) But that was when I lived in the town where I grew up. The town where my parents grew up and my grandparents had lived for almost the entirety of their married life. In my hometown, it is unusual to not see someone you know when you’re out at a restaurant or running errands. The town is smaller than the one in which I currently live, which may be a factor, but I’m not ruling out the family connections as important in this equation.

Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash

This all got me thinking about how little work I had to do to be accepted in the town where I was born. I belonged to a family and just by knowing my last name, people who were practically strangers could determine where and to whom I belonged. When you can trace multiple generations back, you get a free pass for belonging.

How different it is when you move to a new place. We have lived in Pennsylvania for 10 years now, working on our 6th year in our current community. This is how long the work of belonging sometimes takes, and I will be the first to admit that we are bad at it.

When you weren’t born in a place and you don’t have generations to trace back and no one can correctly pronounce your last name, you begin to build barriers around your heart almost without trying. (At least I did. Maybe you are different.) Every cultural reference you don’t understand, every butchering of your name, every way you look and sound different–they all become the bricks you use to wall yourself off from the ones who belong. And you ask yourself a lot of questions about how to belong.

And “will I ever belong?”

Sometimes you even convince yourself you’ll never belong so you stop trying. Instead, you do everything you can to convince people you’re so different and weird that you could never belong anyway, with the secret hope they’ll agree and reject you. (Spoiler alert: the “you” in this story is “me.”)

But your kids will make friends and you will know all the teachers at the school and you’ll find jobs that you love with good people and some of your best friends will live a short drive away. And you’ll start to see people you know when you’re out in public and not just at major events like the Christmas tree lighting or school or church events where almost all of the people you know get together. You’ll find out your kids go to school with the daughter of one of the librarians at the main branch downtown. And when you attend a prayer vigil, you will see a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.

Your world will suddenly feel smaller and bigger all at the same time. You will start to feel something like belonging.

You will know the backroads, the best pizza places,  the names of your neighbors, and the first place to call when you need a good deal on an appliance. You will start to care about things like local government and building projects in your neighborhood.

When at first you felt like a seedling vulnerable to uprooting at the slightest wind, you now feel like a tree with a sturdy trunk and deeper roots, one that could survive a gale.

—

There’s something else about belonging, though. Something I can’t quite put words to or hold in my hand. While I feel more belonging to this place and the people around me, I can’t explain my current obsession with this song which complicates my sense of belonging.

There are still times that I feel like I belong nowhere. Or maybe what I mean is that I belong everywhere. And to everyone. My allegiances and loyalties cannot be neatly packed into one box, and maybe we’re never supposed to fit neatly into a box anyway. As much as I feel a part of things, there are still parts of me I hold back in certain circles, for fear of rejection. (I am a complicated human, sometimes wishing for rejection, sometimes fearing it.)

If you came here looking for the perfect answer about how to belong, then I’ve disappointed you because I don’t have it. I barely have imperfect answers.

All I can say is that sometimes belonging seems like it takes no work but that’s probably because others have done the hard work before you. When I think about my hometown, I think about the work of building relationships my grandparents did before I was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes. I think about the work my parents did in staying in their hometown. Staying is its own kind of hard work.

And if belonging seems an impossible dream, give it time and know that it takes work, but even those are no guarantee. Some circles will never be cracked open to new people. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other circles waiting to welcome you.

So, let me ask: where do you belong?

The circling

It is 6 a.m. and I’m sitting on my porch, mug of coffee in hand, watching traffic whiz by as my thoughts keep pace, one after the other, fleeting snippets of to-do lists and reactions to things I’ve seen, heard or read. This, my ritual for a month or more now, an antidote to the hurry I feel when my feet hit the floor each morning. So much to do, so much to do, better get started.

It is my place to press pause before I hit the fast forward button. Fifteen minutes of nothing but sitting on the porch and drinking a mug of coffee, birds and squirrels for company. At first it was work to stay put. I am a person in one of two modes: constant motion or total rest, seldom anything in between. And the first hours of the morning are, in my mind, for doing, not for being because I’ve just spent hours asleep.

Until I found myself overwhelmed at the start of each day, with to-do lists too long and a day unfolding in multiple directions and a need to just let my mind wander and my body be still. Fifteen minutes, I promised myself, difficult at first but now I want more.

It is my favorite part of each day, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when the weather turns too cold for early morning porch sitting.

—

I hesitated that first morning back after a week in Illinois, wondering if slipping back into a routine I’d established was actually a good thing. I had taken my coffee to the porch most mornings while at my parents’ house but it’s a different experience when the kids wake early and there are other adults getting ready for the day. Returning to my porch in a new month as the summer winds down almost felt like a step backward, as if I should be creating something new for myself, some new rhythm, some new practice.

New, new, new. It’s a constant striving, at least the pull of it is ever-present. The world is tugging us forward and upward with promises that new and more and bigger are better, that visible outward change is a sign of new growth. (Church, I’m thinking of you, too.)

Forward, forward, forward. No looking back. Onward to the next thing.

Maybe we like the idea of straight lines because they show progress. Look how far we’ve come!

But I wonder if there isn’t at least a season of our lives, a time in our development, that is more like circling.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash

—

We stood in the cemetery near my grandfather’s grave, three adults, two kids, one baby, the same place we’d stood two years prior when we’d said our earthly goodbyes, still missing his presence in our lives. I thought about the great-granddaughter we held, the one who wouldn’t know him in this life, and how life goes on. It’s trite and overused but where my grandfather’s life stopped, ours kept moving. The cemetery is full of similar stories.

I took my kids to the other side of the hill where my paternal grandfather is buried, a man they know only from pictures. He’s been gone almost 20 years. Two plots away marks the grave of his son, an uncle who died before I was born. I told the kids what I knew about both men. I don’t know why I felt like I needed to show them these gravestones and tell them these stories. Maybe because it is part of who they are, part of their history.

On this most recent visit to Illinois, I learned from my dad that one of our ancestors was an early settler–a homesteader–of the land where the airport now sits. This awakened something in me, a desire to know more of where I come from so I can know more of who I am. It is a look backward but no part of our family history is unimportant. It all shapes who we are and what we become.

Maybe instead of timelines of our lives, instead of family trees, we could draw circles and where our lives overlap with other family members, the circles could interlock, like the Olympic rings. I’m not an artist or good with shapes but I think I can picture it.

—

I want to grow as a person, to change and be different. In some ways it’s inevitable (hello, post-baby body and 40-year-old hair and skin). Looking at pictures of myself as a child, as a teenager, as a college graduate, I can see all the changes, not all of them good but all of them what they are. This kind of growth and change is obvious and nearly impossible to stop.

But the other kind, it’s harder to see, harder to measure. Is it only good if we’re further from where we started? Is it only change if we can see it? Is it only growth if we’re moving?

I’m thinking of trees and how they are rooted in a place, how some growth we can see (branches stretching to the sky) and some we can’t (roots spreading out beneath the ground). How they cycle through the seasons, how winter looks like death to a tree but is only just a time of rest and replenishment.

I am thinking of our garden, which has been a struggle this year between too little rain, too much rain, and a tangle of weeds we cannot control. This is our third year with the garden in the same place. It is possible that we have stripped this patch of land of its nutrients. Maybe it is time for a rest. Or some fertilizer. (I think there is another metaphor here.)

And I’m thinking of airplanes, these magnificent machines that transport humans from one place to another through the sky in a matter of hours. They cross the country and the globe, sometimes circling the same routes, accumulating miles but always needing a place to land.

Photo by Sebastian Grochowicz on Unsplash

Always needing a place to land.

—

At 6 a.m. on the porch with my coffee, I have found a place to land. No matter the circling I’ve done the day before or the miles ahead of me in the day to come, I am there, in the same place I was yesterday, different and still the same.

We need not fear the circling, the routine that takes us from one day to the next. Even if we cover the same miles we did yesterday, every day is new and different or has the potential to be. Maybe we feel stuck in the same place but the change and the growth we seek is happening underneath. Maybe it’s a season of rest.

And maybe we just don’t see it because we don’t take the time to land.