In the country of my birth

For a long time I said my country wasn’t my home and my home wasn’t my country. Not that it was all that unusual for an ex-pat like myself. Now with my Swiss nationality sworn to and my passport and identity card safely in my pocketbook, my home and country are one in the same. I describe myself as a repat.

Still being back in the nation of my birth raises other issues of belonging. Florida was never where I lived, but where I visited my parents after they retired. My dad was in his own paradise living there years before he died. He brought his brothers and sisters with him until the area was more like a family compound. For him it was a life long dream.

My dreams do not include a retirement community. I want to be with people of different nationalities, different languages and different ages. Although I understand not wanting to have the noise of children playing, I love hearing them and in this over 55 only community, they are absent. Thus I have made other decisions of where and how I want to live. The people here that I meet are as happy with their living arrangements as I am with mine and this is good.

My mom’s home feels like my home when I walk through the door. I know there are brownies in the fridge for me. Hugs and warmth are two of the rules of being together.

Equally when we go out to do errands the people are friendly, but I feel a disconnect. We need to drive everywhere. I am drowning in a dearth of international news, which for a news junkie like myself is enough to send me into the DTs. Now that’s a mixed metaphor I know. I do get a fix when I go to the library to use the internet and can check out what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon by brining up papers from those countries and others.

There are ghosts here. I can’t pop into my Aunt Bert’s, and Uncle Pat still in his tennis shorts won’t pop in the door on his way home from a match. My Aunt Alma is no longer here baking apple pies and taking me to the Crow’s Nest. Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Bert won’t quarrel over a prom dress worn decades before. Other people live in their house because my aunts and uncles are all gone, which reminds me how very, very precious the time with my mom is and I want to wrap these moments in silk.

As I wait for my daughter’s arrival from DC, I am so grateful that it was her idea that we spend Christmas together down here.

I read the books I brought slowly rather than “eat” them as I usually do. I have yet to find a bookstore after frequent forays, and I have forgotten to ask at the library. My mom doesn’t have a library card, shutting off this source of reading material.

The Vision of Emma Blau by Ursula Hegi, a favourite writer, is the one I am rationing at the moment and it talks about a German who returns home for a visit after living in America. There are several quotes that resonate. One of the characters talks about going back to the place of their birth as well as living in a different country.

“For me feeling foreign goes deeper than language…into values…customs…Being an exile in the world…You come back and everything has changed. Even if it still looks the same.

“People, too, they’ve changed. Those who stayed. They don’t understand that when you come back, you’re not the same. And neither are they…you enter a foreign county and sometimes you don’t come back.”

So in many ways I know I can’t go back to the US, I can only go forward. And although I am happy with my choices, thrilled with the way I am living, as in everything there is a price and that is a sadness of what is no longer, but even had I not changed countries, the natural flow of life and death would mean the same loss, it is only heightened by the difference in cultures.