I have lived in twenty-two homes in just under forty years; the vast majority as an adult, having spent age two to eighteen in the same house. In my university years, friends joked that if you wanted to get married, you should live with me; almost all my roommates got hitched the summer after moving into my place. It wasn’t really my college goal to keep cardboard boxes at the ready in case I needed a new living situation, but this is what happened in my early foray into independence. I’d finally settle into the nooks and crannies of an apartment or rental house, only to hear the squeal of a roommate bursting through the door after an eventful date: “He asked me! And I said yes!” A few months later, I’d drag out the boxes and change my address at the post office again.
In hindsight, this was a good thing—I now know I thrive on change, and five different pads in five years of college saved my sanity and kept me going during the bookish years of study all-nighters and shifts waitressing at the local diner. In the thick of it, though, when the lights were off and I was alone in my twin bed, roommate snoring nearby, I’d wonder, What sort of jinxed roommate potion did I drink? It became an annual assumption that I’d need to find a new rent-sharing companion every May, a new place where I could hang my growing collection of gently worn bridesmaid dresses.
I was happy for my friends who found lifelong love so early, but I was also relieved I hadn’t. I hoped the person for me was out there somewhere, but in my early twenties, I felt as young as I was. I did the math, calculated how much time I had to enjoy being called wife even if I waited a solid decade to marry. When it was my turn to graduate, there were blessedly no suitors on the horizon.
Instead of settling down into family life, I applied for a teaching position that required a move to Kosovo, a war-torn pocket in former Yugoslavia, a country fresh from a genocide spearheaded by the dictator Slobodan Milo?evi?. This was my resistance against registering for tea towels and gravy boats and settling into picket-fence suburbia.
This postgraduate season of teaching English to Albanian teenagers, conserving water by taking weekly showers, and cursing a spotty, generator-powered Internet connection in a tiny Albanian village was, somehow, dreamy. I lived in a second-floor apartment on a nameless street in a village of a thousand people who seemed suspended in time. Cars had rolled in only twenty years earlier, and those same cars traveled these streets. My landlords and employers were an American family helping repair the devastated land and its inhabitants, and I took my cultural cues from them. That year I learned how to sit with my thoughts and go without English-speaking companionship in my age bracket (quite the change from university life, mere months before). I learned how to start a wood-burning stove and felt like Ma Ingalls with a navel piercing. I learned to make do without a clothes dryer, as most of the world does, and I learned to burn my trash instead of carting it to the curb on garbage day.
I also learned home mattered to me more than I thought it did. After a childhood spent under one roof, I blossomed in the hodgepodge experience of college, and was convinced that normal things—like predictable water output from the bathroom sink—weren’t my highest priority. I categorized myself an Adventurer, someone who flies by the seat of her pants, who needs the next thing around the bend so long as it isn’t settling down. I sought out experimental food from the local hole-in-the-wall café—fish still with its head, rabbit casserole—and shunned any resemblance of a self-initiated menu plan.
But after months of daily work in the village, riding the bus into the capital city once a month to call my parents from an international phone, and sleeping under a borrowed blanket I’d never pick for myself, there it was, an innocent little truth staring me in the face six months into my life in Kosovo: I liked the idea of home. Things like wall colors and candles mattered to me more than I had guessed, and it felt freeing to admit it. I wanted to sink into the unpredictability of a cross-cultural life, yes, but I also wanted a bona fide home. This was a season of refinement, of acknowledging there were multiple sides to me that were equally true.
I was infected with an incurable sense of wanderlust, but I was also a homebody.
I matured into adulthood when I acknowledged this truth.
We may not have soul mates in this life, but most of us have my-God-if-I-don’t-walk-through-the-rest-of-my-life-with-that-person-I’m-an-idiot mates. Kyle was a like-minded American living a few villages over, rebuilding houses for widows who had lost everything during the horrific genocide instigated by Milo?evi?. We hit it off instantly. There was someone else in the world willing to work a horribly paying job in order to play a small part in restoring a ravaged country to its former, if not makeshift, ancient glory. I wasn’t looking for him, but when you find that special someone swimming with Albanian teenage boys in a lake potentially swirling with all strains of hepatitis and you’re still attracted to him, you don’t walk away.
We were fast friends, and we spent all our time together. We helped widows and the poor; we unearthed smoky, seedy jazz bars in the capital city; we took rickety buses to Thessaloniki and found cheap hostels on the beach. And when we weren’t together, in the quiet of my own apartment, I wondered whether Kyle was thinking of me as much as I was of him.
We married two years later and vowed to spend our life thick in adventure. Preferably overseas.
God has a sense of humor.
Ten years later, I tuck my youngest son into bed and creep back downstairs to finish the dinner dishes. Kyle tosses toys back into buckets, both of us grateful for this time of the day, when quieter hours bookend nighttime kisses and passing out from the day’s toil. Our home is of the typical suburban variety, freshly remodeled with our own hands. When I chop carrots, I stand on trendy distressed wood slats; when I empty the dishwasher and toss the silverware into its drawer, the track silently glides shut like a modern marvel. We don’t suffer from an overload of stuff by normal American standards, but I am still nagged by the notion that our closets are too full. I am happy to have these dishes to wash, because it means our family eats well, and the tucking-in ritual means the children have a comfortable place to sleep. I know from our years living abroad this is no small thing for many parents and their children.