Tag Archives: trains

Friends’ Homes and Peculiar Gifts

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I am almost home from this journey. Almost, but not quite. The trip been the things I expected, but also more. There have been eleven train stations (plus two bus stations for good measure). And when you travel by train, you look out the window a lot and see the trees and the fields and the small-town roads and jails and houses flashing past, then laid gently on top of all that you see your own reflection looking back at you.

Last week I had a long layover in downtown Chicago, so I stored my luggage and bought a pass to the Art Institute. I walked there down full, sunny streets. Wearing a wide brimmed hat and a short flowy dress in the Windy City was an added complication, but I didn’t really mind. This is how you expect solo travel to be: a little complex, but peaceful. I wandered through room after room at the Art Institute, photos and paintings and stained glass and pencil sketches and antique furniture, with the soft feeling that beauty tends to give me creeping along my skin. I took breaks from the art to each lunch in the courtyard and to walk down past Buckingham Fountain to the shore of Lake Michigan.

But most of this trip has not been cosmopolitan like that. Most of this trip has been family homes. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve been in a succession of them. There have been four babies, lots of toddlers and preschoolers, and a few older kids too. The highlights of days have been trips to the park with double strollers, family ice cream runs, and little hikes suitable for small legs through midwest woods. I’ve curled on many different couches to write.

These friendships all have a sweet longevity, sustained by small, unremarkable bits of upkeep when we see each other. We go to the library, and I pick out good grown-up novels for them while they watch their kids play in the children’s section. We color each other’s hair with henna because we’ve talked about it for a couple years now. We sit in the evening and watch something and chat long, holding out memories and future hopes to each other with equal care.

I am more aware than I’ve ever been of my friends’ generosity. Traveling this way requires it, requires people to rouse themselves out of bed at odd hours to take me to the train station, to make space for me in their rhythms and homes and at their tables. Going through this pattern of being cared for in place after place was more humbling than I knew it would be.

But this is what it means to be in each other’s lives.

Last night, bleary and tired I sat on the train looking down at the rings on my hand—the amethyst from my grandma and the pearl I found in that rental car last summer— and thought of all the pudgy little fingers that have reached out to fiddle with them in the past couple weeks. And suddenly, with my head leaned against the window, I was teary.

I am a woman with a natural instinct to mother, but single in my thirties and surrounded by peers who are in what we like to call a “different stage of life” from me. I will tell you, some days I feel as if an important part of me is wasting away, withering imperceptibly month by month while no one watches. The oft-repeated suggestion of pouring that directionless love into someone else’s children almost always clangs like a trite consolation prize, no matter how nice the kid or good the friend.

But as I looked at those rings, and thought of the little people nestled into my side who had touched them, a quiet wonder happened. I was fully, divinely aware of what a peculiarly glistening gift the last two weeks have been. I sat there and cried because, as someone told me once, we serve a no waste God, and he takes our deep desires into his own hands, and uses them in ways we could not imagine.

Because the gift of being with my friends’ young families was not a gift to me only. I’ve spent this time buckling so many car seats, holding so many hands as we cross a street, and swaying with so many fussy babies balanced against my hip. I’ve read more books aloud than I can count, small bodies using my arm or shoulder to somersault themselves into a new spot on the couch. My lap has more real estate for sitting on than a nursing mother’s and I know card games the school age kids haven’t learned yet. I can cook dinner with a thirteen-year-old for a sous chef while his mom runs out to pick up his sister and I can make sure the toddlers don’t touch the breakables in the general store. In return, I’m called “Miss Alice” in a sweet host of piping voices. 

Some kids who a decade ago hugged my legs with head mashed against my hip are now taller than me. The ones who hugged my legs this past week will grow fast like that too, and whether I have my own kids or not, I get to watch, and watching is a joy.

I’ve had much time to think about all this, because my last travel leg home has been a long and ridiculous saga. There were four graveyard-shift hours spent waiting at the Indianapolis Amtrak station, and then twenty-four straight hours on a train, about seven of which were at a total standstill. Arriving in Charlottesville after three this morning, the station attendant sent several of us in a taxi to a hotel outside of town where we would stay for free, but when we were dropped there and walked into the lobby we found that they had no record of us. Eventually I got some real sleep in a clean bed though, and now, after a sticky midday walk, I am sitting at the University of Virginia library writing this to you. I will catch my final train home this evening.

I’d planned to be back in my own space by now, and I’ll be happy when I am. And yet. Despite exhaustion and discomfort, this last day or two has been its own peculiar gift. I’ve been surrounded at every juncture by people who seem straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story, their outrageous humanity busting through all the cracks in their veneer. I’ve watched and laughed and thought about what wonderfully messy, oozing poetry they would make. 

But that’s for another day.

Today I am simply grateful for all of the last few weeks: all the homes I’ve entered, all the beds I’ve slept in, all the plates set in front of me, all the arms wrapped around me, and all the beauty I’ve seen. And most, I’m grateful for the grace of God in allowing me to occasionally understand just how good I have it.

East of the Mississippi

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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.