Hitting the reset button at home

Home is a feeling, a state of being.

My mother is the queen of hospitality. After just a few days in her care, all troubles seem to melt away as the good food, fellowship and rest start to brighten one's outlook and revive the soul.

Home is a familiar place where dark troubles in the distance, the great unknowns are reduced to a light drizzle on the windows rather than pelting cold that doubles you over in fear and confusion.

My family is a family of wanderers and virtual vagabonds, resistant to a lax existence tied to place. But we have a home, at least a place of congregation where we've gathered for many years.

In driving up that familiar, deeply sloped driveway lined with pine needles and oak leaves, I am aware of where I am. But its warmth and welcome are experienced only when occupied by the members of my family.

This week my little sister Aimee is traveling the Middle East for work, and though our dinner conversations are alive with stories and fellowship, it's not the same without her sitting at her familiar place at the table. My brother-in-law is away as well, and his conviviality is missed.

I've often thought about how one creates that sense of home. Especially in light of moving my family around as much as we have these last 16 years. My mother, as I've said, does this with an unswerving sense of hospitality and care. My father is the patriarch, the storyteller, the passer on of wisdom. Together, they are the sense of home I most want to emulate.

As places go, our little enclave along Battle Creek Road is not the quaintest old building or the most pristine hillside. The one-and-a-half acres are slightly overgrown, and the tall pines block the view for the most part.

It's a place created and recreated as our family grew. A hillside manor, of sorts, a place we come to gather where the marks of our former existence make us feel welcome but which do not hold a candle to the necessity of having family present. Without the players, this little world would not matter at all. Except to my brother, of course. His penchant for place is perhaps far more developed than the rest of us. His handy work is seen in the jungle-like back yard, where a fish pond and cold-hardy palm trees soak up the rain showers like sponges.

The old tree fort my dad built for us has been replaced by a new tree fort named the Dawn Treader in honor of our love for C.S. Lewis' famed children's books "The Chronicles of Narnia," but mostly because a tree fort in the imaginative state of being a ship is the most fun a kid can have. I think.

Life in our house happens around the dinner table, where we sit close together eating from myriad dishes like a tasty carousel circling in front of us each night. We spend long hours sitting and talking, going from dinner to late-evening tea and cookies through dozens and dozens of conversations.

It has always been this way. Only today there is more laughter and mirth as the house is filled with grandchildren running and playing as we fellowship.

The remnants of our attempts to farm the land are evident in the old chicken coop falling into disrepair, the old goat fences clinging to rotting posts and a rabbit or two eating grass on the lawn. We are not farmers, though I believe we're nostalgic for some trace of it in our history.

My mom travels the world with my father, she is savvy about the bigger picture and can converse about almost any topic with ease. But her pioneer roots are evident in the ceiling-high shelves full of canned goods in the garage. I don't know when she has the time to accomplish these things, but over the last few days we've tasted amazing brined pickles and fresh horse radish as well as dried peppers and other examples of her harvest.

There are many reasons to love the comforts of home. Mine are nearly all found in the individuals who make up my family. But we've carved out a bit of a comfortable Hobbit hole here on this hillside. When we're not adventuring around the world, we gather here and fill it with warmth and the smells of good food and conversation that resounds for me like cathedral bells long after I leave.

In moving to a place that is as far away as moving across the sea somewhere, I feel a sense of loneliness already, and it makes me want to grab up every last moment here as if I won't be back for some time.

Home is the place you come to reset all the settings. As I revive here with all that I love, I realize that this is what I will need to create for the next generation of us. Place is only as good as those who inhabit it.

Tim

The hardest drive

I wrote this in my head as I drove today.

That will have to serve as an apology for what follows.

I sat in the cab of the big U-haul truck and wondered how many emotions had bounced around the interior during the course of its life.

We pulled out of a cold and rainy Missoula at noon. Carson rode shotgun with his leopard gecko Morris. Carson cried for the first twenty minutes or so, especially as we passed through the neighborhood.

My closest friends came by to see us off, and it was all I could do to hold it together to keep thinking about what needed to go in the truck next.

I don't cry much. In fact, I shed tears so infrequently that my wife freaks out a little when it happens. All I wanted to do today was find some quiet place to be alone and think about all I was leaving behind. Instead I fought wind and rain behind the wheel of a big orange and white truck, stacking emotions like clothes in my suitcase.

The cab was a cathedral of sorts. A noisy, bumpy place to try and reflect on the events of the last two months. Carson and I tried to chat off and on, but we were both aware of how easy it would be to totally break down.

Missoula is apparently located in some state of mind people call the last best place. Sometimes I think certain situations are the last best...

Our goodbye get together on Friday served as a last chance to enjoy a beer with good friends. A last best party. Saturday evening was an impromptu last best dinner with a few close friends who had helped us move the detritus of our Missoula existence into that U-haul.

This morning when we were packing, I just wanted to be done and on the road. I knew that if I stopped long enough, all the emotions that have been building up would come pouring out, and that wouldn't be a pretty sight.

And still, in spite of keeping my mind focused on my task like a brain surgeon must, when my friends showed up for one last best goodbye, I felt myself slipping into that familiar pre-cry moistness. I looked the other way instead of making eye contact, and when I'd catch my wife losing it after hugging our neighbors goodbye, I had to start talking to myself out loud to keep from going there.

I wanted to harden all the soft parts and numb anything that felt sharp and uncomfortable. I don't have time to grieve right now. The hum in the cab of the U-haul was cathartic in a way. Like monks chanting. I started to try to match the tenor, but I found myself easing into memories too swiftly when I wasn't focused on something other than everything cascading into whatever pit that is within me that collects whatever fuels those stormy emotions.

Eastern Washington is cathartic too. Something about the way it has been scoured out by the many Glacial Lake Missoula floods stirs up sediment in my soul that keeps me from feeling much. I think about ancient floods and how so much land owes so much to such powerful forces of change outside of its control. I thought about Lewis and Clark and the fact that I've spent much of my life along a big portion of the trail they carved across the country. I thought about adventure and overcoming adversity, but too much thought like that shrinks you next to the giants of the past.

 Somewhere along the way I tried to cap the bottle by making notes about the future. This is what needs to be done by tomorrow. I need to finish this task by Thursday.

Then I got a text message from a friend in Missoula, and my world tilted a little bit, loosening whatever fastener I had tried to seal in those emotions with.

The kids all cried their little hearts out in the morning, and by late afternoon, they just wanted to be somewhere familiar. By the time we rolled into the driveway at grandma and grandpa Akimoffs' place, the kids were onto something new.

The sadness of leaving people you love is a very individual emotion. Everyone suffers something privately. There is no collective feeling that can be understood. For some it's visible, like tear-stained cheeks. For others it's a very personal piece of heart luggage with few visible signs of existence.

Long drives are good for sorting out thoughts and feelings. I've always felt collected after driving. Today was different. I should have let that U-haul-cab cathedral be my confessional, but I'm not quite ready to suffer. I know that will come. Like a good journalist, I like to put off the suffering until right before deadline. Somehow it sharpens the wit and creates beauty.

But my heart still hurts tonight. My longing for what used to be kept me from listening to certain songs I knew I would feel too much.

Ah, I miss you!

Tim

The kids aren't alright

The question I get most often now is: "So what do the kids think about moving to Alaska?" The second most common question is: "How are the kids handling the move?"

Those are fair questions, but as a parent, I find it tough to answer for the kids. So I asked them about how they feel about the move.

My oldest son, Cole, answers that he does not wish to leave Missoula. When pressed for reasons, he'll say that he'll miss his best friend Grant, running cross country and his school friends.

Cole is a focused kid. When he was born, people would remark about how calm he was. As he grew up, we realized we had a little man on our hands and not a toddler. He always prefers to hang out with the adults. He likes to be part of the conversation, and he hates to be left out.

He wants to attend Stanford University, after which he plans to get a master's degree in computer design. His goal is to be the next CEO of Apple Computers. To that end, he works very hard at school and serves on the student council. I sometimes wonder where on earth this kid came from.

Alaska is all right, he says. He's looking forward to the adventure, but he's sad to be leaving all that he put so much energy into these last three years.

As a parent it's sometimes difficult to quantify all that a child has seen and done in the same period of time. I have to learn to value those things that my kids value in order to assess the cost of moving them away.

Our middle child, Carson, is a dreamer who lives inside his imagination at least 10 hours a day. He doesn't vocalize things well, so I can only assume he's struggling with the idea of moving. He's 52-pounds soaking wet, and he dreams of playing football for the Griz, because his best friend Dylan has the same dreams. Carson plays flag football and absolutely lives for the game.

When I've asked him how he feels about moving, he shrugs his shoulders and throws his surfer-length blond hair out of his eyes. "Ummm, I don't know. It will be cool," he says.

That's about as far as I've progressed with him. But I can see other signs of nervousness there. He's struggling with leaving what he's become comfortable with. Carson has huge dreams, but he, more than any of us, needs a firm foundation on which to have those dreams. Unstable ground means he lives more in the here and now, and when you live in the here and now, it's very difficult to fly. I know this, because Carson is me. I was once the very 9-year-old he is. I dreamed the same dreams and lived in my imagination as much as possible.

In some ways, I empathize more with Carson than anyone else, because I see some of this through his eyes. I can remember how he feels, and I feel bad that he can't express himself through what adults consider normal pathways of expression.

Gabrielle is, like most four-year-olds, along for the ride. She doesn't seem to show any anxiety, and she's legitimately excited about some of the things she's heard about. Almost every park in Anchorage has a frozen field for hockey and ice skating. She's excited to see moose in town, and this will be her first airplane ride.

Mostly she just asks questions about those things that affect her day. "Mom, what are we doing today?" I don't think she has a concept of leaving friends behind. She certainly didn't when we moved to Montana three years ago. It bothers me a bit that this move will teach her about the pain of losing friends.

Mostly I tell people that the kids are doing just fine. Fine is a relative term when considering that we're packing up our lives, leaving our own house and moving to the last frontier, a place from which we have to fly to visit family instead of the one-day trips we used to be able to do under cover of darkness so I could drive in peace.

The easiest explanation, and the one I struggle with the most is this: The kids aren't alright.

As the Offspring song says:

Chances thrown, nothing's free
Longing for, used to be
Still it's hard, hard to see
Fragile lives, shattered dreams

But kids are resilient in a way that adults are not. Those shattered dreams change up a little bit. Everyone wants to be a garbage man, an astronaut and a firefighter at some point in their lives. Relocating can push dreams around a bit, like puzzle pieces, but kids are nothing if not masters of putting those puzzle pieces back together. And often as not, they'll get a new picture and a new dream out of the deal.

This is my chance to learn something about rebuilding from those little master craftsman of dreams.

Tim