So there I was, totally naked in my garage, trying to decide if I should laugh or scream because the situation was so absurd. But I should start from the beginning.
Friends, it has been far too long since I’ve written to you. (Erik and I have been married over a year already!) This post was so long in coming because I was going through a weird transition of identity. I used to be an “Overseas Worker” and felt like I deserved to write and solicit your prayers. And then I became a “Texas Housewife” and it suddenly felt self-promoting, somehow, to send out mass messages about my random activities and musings.
At least I didn’t actually show up at the in-laws’ house with a bucket full of poison ivy
People often ask me what I do with my time. The answer is complicated: I’ve attempted to justify my existence with some freelance translation work and some training to be a professional interpreter in a language no one needs, but most of my time this year has really been spent transitioning, corresponding with people, writing down memories, and trying to get my feet under me again as an adult in America. That was more of a challenge than I foresaw.
For one thing, it took much longer than I expected to de-bachelor-pad the house. That means hanging up some art, assembling shelves to replace piles of books, painting a few walls in sunnier colors than Blah Beige, furnishing guest rooms, taking down a rotting privacy fence around the backyard, and rearranging the kitchen so it’s functional for preparing meals other than carry-out Chipotle.
Then there were all the learning curves this year, like figuring out how to cook. Fortunately Erik is not a picky eater, and all it really takes to please him is to triple the meat from the recipe proportions. (Or, better yet, just throw in a little bacon. I’m getting comfortable eating pork again.) Cooking is getting easier with practice, plus now I know where things are in the grocery store, and I usually don’t get lost driving back home. I’ve also stopped bursting into tears when I pull into the driveway because the Google Maps navigation voice suddenly announces “Welcome home!”
I panicked and decided to strip my pants off, right there in the yard
I could probably boil down my year into two words: making home. I’m starting to realize that home isn’t something you find; it’s something you make. I’ll come back to that theme after I tell you about what happened back there in the garage. It all started with an innocent foray into lawn care.
Because, my goodness, lawn care has been another big learning curve. I’ve been fertilizing our “natural lawn” (read: vicious weeds), repeatedly mowing the irises to the ground until I found out what they were (they bloomed anyway, God bless them!), and trying to learn how to identify the local flora and fauna. For example, this spring my father-in-law wanted to transplant some pecan seedlings from our yard to his. As I prepared to dig up some for him, I emailed pictures of what I found to make sure they were the right plants.
“Nope,” he wrote back. “The first one is an oak tree, and the second one is poison ivy!”
Oops. But at least I asked, instead of actually showing up at the in-laws’ house with a bucket full of poison ivy.
I’ve also struggled through some gardening experiments. Last summer I learned just how hot central Texas can get. All my plants withered up and died except a single bell pepper plant, which I barely managed to keep alive through the growing season. It would wilt down to the ground every day, then pop up again morning and evening when I watered it. It never got big enough to produce any peppers.
This spring I tore up a bunch of sod in a shadier part of the backyard to plant a vegetable garden. The jury is out on how successful it will be, and I think most of the herb seeds were eaten by blue jays, but I enjoyed the tilling process. One of the times I have felt most at home in this new environment was when I was doing what my overseas potato farmer host family taught me — turning dirt with a shovel to prepare the ground for planting.
Another tricky part of lawn care has been the fleas, and that’s where I ran into trouble. We seem to have regular spring flea infestations in our yard, despite not having pets. (Maybe it’s from the possum family living under the tool shed, or the neighbors’ decrepit cats that lurk around and take dumps in my flower beds. I still don’t understand what kind of defunct cat doesn’t bury its own poo– and it should be so easy! It’s loose mulch, for pete’s sake! But I guess I should be grateful they’re fertilizing my roses.)
Anyway, the fleas. The other day I was spraying around the foundation of the house to keep the fleas at bay. As I finished that project, I looked down and thought I had stepped on an anthill. There were hundreds of little black things streaming up my pants legs. I tried to brush them off and they sprung back like iron filings to a magnet. They were fleas! CRAWLING UP MY BODY. It was like a horror movie.
I panicked and decided to strip my pants off, right there in the yard. Then my prefrontal cortex kicked in and I quickly changed my mind. I had, after all, taken down the privacy fence. Our sweet old neighbors, the ones with the ancient cats, spend most of their retired lives smoking in their backyard, and I didn’t want to send them into cardiac arrest. So I decided I would run into the garage and take my clothes off there. There was no way I was going to track these fleas indoors.
I sprinted to the side door of the garage and made my second nasty discovery of the day: I was locked out of the house.
I had left a push-button lock engaged when I went outside, and now I was stuck in the backyard. Thankfully, last year I hid a spare key inside a realtor’s lockbox that we somehow inherited, so I gratefully retrieved that. Meanwhile the fleas hopped ever upwards on my clothing. I looked down. There was already one on my chest. Shudder. I got back to the side door and tried the key. But no! This key only works in the front door.
Once again rejoicing that I hadn’t taken off my pants yet, I sprinted around to the front door and let myself in. I ran through the house as fast as I could back to the garage, hoping all the fleas would hang on tight and not bail onto the carpets before I could get back out of the house.
In the garage, I tore all my clothes off, killed as many fleas as I could, and threw my clothes in the dryer to bake off the rest of the fleas before I went inside. Whew- crisis averted. I’ve hardly seen any fleas in the house since that incident. (Except the one that just hopped on my arm as I type this, but that’s the first one today and we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.)
If we can communicate clearly about our desires and disappointments, it gives people safety
We can’t afford to have fleas terrorizing people in our house: we have a pretty steady stream of visitors. In the 10 months that Erik and I have lived in this house in Texas together, we have had 3 months’ worth of guests in our home. (All of whom we very much enjoyed and learned from; none of whom we explicitly invited.) 😉 God has a way of tossing people into our world, and we’re beginning to see hospitality as one of our family values.
Erik and I have been wondering what it looks like to create a safe space where people can be who they are and feel comfortable sharing vulnerably. We strive to do that for one another in our marriage, and we want to learn how to create it for our guests. We hung a little chalkboard by the front door:
Telling people the rules right out of the gate (we take off our shoes here) is another learning journey for us. Lately I’ve been pondering boundaries, which didn’t seem to be appropriate in my overseas culture but are crucial in our American culture somehow. We have enough autonomy and diversity that it becomes important to let people know from the start what the expectations are. If we can communicate clearly about our desires and disappointments, it gives people safety. Then they can make a conscious choice about how they want to love and honor us (or not), knowing how we will receive it.
In all my time overseas, I learned that home for me is in God’s presence, not some specific geographic location. Home is where I know and am known. We’re learning how to draw good boundaries so others know us, while also allowing them to be known and loved in our house.
That’s all the musing for now. (Come visit us in Texas anytime. We have two guest bedrooms. And the fleas are almost under control.)
What really makes a place feel like home to you? (Scroll down for comments!)