This summer I made a promise to myself, to the universe, to anyone who cared, that I would stay in the United States and east of the Mississippi. But, because in the last few years I can’t seem to stay put no matter how I try, I immediately planned a trip that tested the limits of that promise: spend most of July journeying around the Northeast and Midwest, visiting friend after friend after friend. Between stops, I would take Amtrak, look out the window, and work on a book about friendship. In my head, this was a satisfying construction. Different friends, themselves homebound with kids or job, affectionately referred to it as my “East Coast Tour” or my “Grand Adventure.” I was pleased.

I boarded the train last Friday in Greensboro—my first time on a train in the US in fifteen years—and immediately found myself glad for its peace. I liked the way it moved. Its glide and shiver suited me. I liked that we passed so many tiny towns called “Crossing” or “Junction” and that I could hear a train whistle (our train whistle) for ten or twenty seconds before we blew through them. I could hear trains from my childhood bedroom and they have always been a home sound to me. And I liked the way mountains and tunnels slurped us up whole like a long noodle before spitting us back out into the green.

Because of a bad delay (the only one I’ve had so far) I spent an unexpected night in DC, courtesy of Amtrak, before arriving outside Boston the next day. Then there was a warm, lovely few days with my friend Heather, seeing her New England. We walked in the woods, ate dinner at an old inn, and drove down many winding green two lane roads. We ate ice cream, visited the ducks at the Boston Public Gardens, and poked around antique and book stores where even my stern sales resistance was put to the test. We wrote together, and wandered round graveyards populated mainly by three hundred year old dead with “memento mori” engraved solemnly on their headstones.

But the best bits were in the rain: hurrying to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through puddles to wander past its tile and courtyard and art and papers and stone and people, and then that evening giggling together under a golf umbrella in Lexington as we waited wetly for early Fourth of July fireworks, which came eventually, lighting our upturned faces with green and red and white. The smoke from up north gradually cleared throughout the week. One evening I sat on Heather’s parents couch before dinner, the house full of the smell of bacon and the sound of a ticking fan and “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and thought that while this was not my home, it certainly was a home, in every good sense of the word.

Early Wednesday morning I left on a train from South Station in Boston. I slept as we sped back down the coast of New England, the way I’d already come, and then, it must be admitted, took some time to check and ponder my students’ newly released AP scores. I switched trains in Philly, and crossed Pennsylvania from side to side, something I’d never done before despite spending my college years there. Here, instead of being encased in tunnels of green overgrowth, there were breaks in the trees and the scenery was lush and simple, homes and hills and fields. We climbed up round edges of mountains rather than shooting through them. This was railroad country in a way my home down south was not. 

Then I arrived in Pittsburgh for my days alone, between proper stops, between friends. Each day I walked downtown a bit—to the park, along the river, where a few people floated along on a buoyant tiki bar beneath gray clouds. After just a couple blocks I was always sweaty, somehow both gooey and squeaky in all my crevices. The people on the street I passed, either swinging along purposefully or wandering lost in their own minds, made me feel both more and less alone. Cutting back up from the riverwalk I found a tunnel lined with tumbling LED-lit waterfalls. It was deserted, cool and fresh.

My AirBnB was convenient and safe and comfortable, but devoid of personality, almost entirely blank. As I curled into its corners to read and write, I wondered how I could, for myself if not for future occupants, fill in that blank. I’d intended an external grand adventure, but I was maybe a fool to think it would not be an internal adventure as well. The Lord usually intends more than we do. I moved home a year ago, and this summer has been my first real break in the action to think about all the changes of my last half-decade. And I don’t intend any more changes for the time being. I’m settling in and that’s significant.

On top of that, the main task of my writing right now is to remember. To catalog many of the most important relationships of my life and try to put into words the way they’ve shaped me. I’m writing about what sort of friend and what sort of woman I’ve become and how. I’ve always been a habitual rememberer, but let me tell you—swallowed in extra-large doses like this, memory is potent stuff. And the faulty memories mold you just as much as the true ones, forming this bright, painfully irreverent patchwork of selfhood.

I am grateful for the ability to remember, to stitch meaning together, to follow steel tracks from one familiar friend to another in a wide slow loop, but something about this trip has made me already hold home a little closer, has made me more hopeful (or at least more desirous) for the now and the not yet, for the settling in to come.

My friend Emily picked me up midday today and I’m now back in the town where I went to undergrad, and then I’ll see Laura and then to Abby and then Hannah. There will be several babies and bigger kids too and I’ll probably stop and see art in Chicago. There is richness in all of that.

But a joyful part of my mind, a part which urges me on, also whispers: You get to go back and write those pieces for church, you get to check on the wildflowers you planted, you get to sketch out improvements to curriculums, you get to paint your cabinets, you get to sort clothing and papers, you get to be in place, your place, and work to make things grow.