2. On Homesickness

Candelaria Complementaria, originally uploaded by diegomccormick.

Every night in the hospital, a member of the housekeeping crew would stop in my doorway to chat. His subject was homesickness, a topic that was particularly resonant for me, since I, too, was longing for the familiar clang and clatter of home.

My friend was from Colombia. He'd been in the U.S. for twenty-two years and his children had been born here. Still, when he went to sleep every night, he dreamed of his old home in Medellin, a place he could only afford to visit every few years.

"Every night for twenty-two years!' he emphasized.

But wasn't Medellin home of the drug cartels? One of the most violent cities on earth?

"No!" he insisted, the violence had abated in recent years; and besides, that had never been his Medellin. His city was the city of eternal spring where the weather is always magnificent. His city was the place where neighbors sat on their stoops and laughed together at night, a place where street festivals lasted all night, and everyone--young and old--came out to dance.

His Medellin was a place where colors were brighter, where food had more taste, and you couldn't walk through the neighborhood without hearing the sound of music.

He spoke so passionately about his lost home that for three nights I dreamed I was there, dancing all night at a street festival, wandering through neighborhoods transformed by vivid color and music.

But on the fourth night, when he stopped to talk about how much he missed his family, how a brother had died while he was away, and he'd never had an opportunity to attend the funeral, my own homesick dreams also took a turn.

That night I dreamed of my first home, of the trees outside the closet-sized room with the pink rose wallpaper where I spent my childhood, and the scent of lilac in the spring. In the next room my parents argued and loved, dreamed and worried. Our lives there, now vanished, seemed as solid and indestructible as those tall oaks and catalpas outside my window. When I woke up, the feeling of being in that house were so real that it seemed impossible that I could never return. That it had become a lost kingdom.

My last night in the hospital I watched for my friend from Colombia, but he didn't appear. Apparently, it was his night off. He was probably spending it at home with his wife, and with the daughters who considered the U.S. home--the oldest one a nursing student, the younger one earning straight As in private school. For them, my friend said, he had given up his home.

Still my homesick dreams continued. But this time they were filled with the sounds and colors of the life I live now: my daughter coming in from her student teaching every day, tired but full of stories, my son's inexhaustible guitar, ordinary days spent writing, and hanging laundry, and having dinner with Ted. My own version of the "place of eternal spring"--even in New England winter.

The next day I was released to that old life, but with a new sense and appreciation for its precariousness, its preciousness, with a new sense that even this beloved time and place will one day be a house where the door is locked to me forever.