Home

I am 8,600 miles from my childhood home. It took me a car ride, two flights, two bus transfers, a midnight wander with a very nice if rather sweaty Kiwi couple, a pack of Orbit Sweet Mint gum, a free sleep mask, and a pleading phone call with my bank to please unfreeze my credit card, I am not being coerced into spending all of my money in Oceania to get here. And where is here? I’ve been on New Zealand’s North Island for a few weeks now, hopping from hostel to hostel and farm to farm, trying to figure out who I am and why I’m here and who planned this (I did) and what exactly my response is supposed to be when asked whether I’ve brought my togs along (I did). I’ve wanted this for years, and now, looking out at the pouring rain, I’m already wondering where to go next. That’s the tricky thing about dreams, isn’t it? What’s left to do after you’ve achieved them?

I’ve still got about two months more to putz around in the Land of the Long White Cloud, which will be greatly aided by my recent purchase of a long red Volvo from some departing British PhDs. It’s got a cozy bed in the back and an odometer that reads somewhere south of 200,000 kilometers, my only two requirements for hitting the road. It’ll be my home base as I wind on the left-hand side through the rolling hills and never-ending greenscreen they call Aotearoa. It’s got me thinking, though, about what makes something a home. What is a home? Can anything be one?

It’s a word that people like to toss around. A Canadian girl I met last week told me that I sounded like home, and then made me a surprise cinnamon coffee. In a yoga class that evening, our teacher had us focus on recentering ourselves and realigning our cores. Our body is our home, and we must care for it, she said, the sun setting behind her in great arching rays over the Pacific. Her words made me think of those Ben & Jerry’s pints with the cores. Am I just brownie batter in the middle? When I lived in Maine, there was a big sign along the highway on the state line that said MAINE: WELCOME HOME. I remember seeing it sandwiched between MOOSE ON ROADWAY warnings and thinking, Here we go. It was time to sit down, buckle up and get comfortable. It took a few weeks among the rocky pools and the hemlocks, but soon enough it was a place - a forest, really - that I couldn’t bear to leave.

The hemlocks. Mighty, towering conifers with the smallest, softest needles, many of them covered in an ominous white substance left by an invasive insect called the woolly adelgid. Part of my job last summer was spreading word of their plight. It was a good fit for me; I know my trees. Five years ago, over a thousand miles from the evergreens of New England, beneath the bur oaks of Iowa, my grandpa suffered a fatal stroke. Somehow in the chaos afterwards, I ended up with his lime-green 1963 field guide to the trees of North America. It’s been my beloved ever since, splattered with Hershey’s syrup, mud, and saltwater and twice-stapled along the spine. When I was packing for the Southern Hemisphere, though, it didn’t make the cut; what use could it have?

As luck would have it, I landed in Auckland in an unprecedented storm in a summer of record rainfall and severe weather. My first few days of adjusting to the 18-hour time difference were largely spent wandering around the city soaking wet. On one such bedraggled outing, I ducked under some branches to get out of the drizzle and found myself enveloped in one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. I had found Albert Park, a small urban oasis in the heart of the city. As I surrendered to the rain and wove between trunks and over roots, I noticed that many of the scattered leaves seemed familiar. I returned three times over the course of the week and began to cultivate a sort of memory map, a feeling of home away from home, even as I reached into my pack for a lime-green booklet that wasn’t there.

There were the southern magnolias with their great white blossoms and fuzzy seeds that I remember fallen and wilted on my preschool’s red-brick sidewalk. There was a Norfolk Island Pine, a twin to the potted one in my parents’ living room, sandwiched between a sycamore - the first tree I could ever positively identify - and a sweet gum dropping dangerously delightful spikeballs. There was a sprawling oak that could belong in the nature preserves of the Outer Banks or the bustling squares of Savannah, gnarled, timeless, dignified. I ran my fingers along its endless branches and remembered years of strung-up hammocks and bare feet and blue water. There were cedars like Cape Cod’s and figs like Thailand’s and a eucalyptus like the one I used to teach beneath on Catalina Island. To me, the park was an explosion of memories, an interactive museum celebrating the places I’ve seen and lived. I was lonely and wet and finally seeing patterns and textures I recognized felt like bumping into old friends. Oh, there you are.

Those trees ignited something within me. In the weeks since then, I’ve noticed cornfields and dry yellow flowers and tiny mushrooms and billowing ferns, all tied to the locations - most of them as far around the circumference of the Earth as you can get - that grew me. Jason Isbell sings that man is a product of all the people that he ever loved; I’d add places to that tally. My most successful lesson as an environmental educator was probably when I abandoned the required reading and had my island-visiting college students share their most precious outdoor spaces with their peers. Their answers, spoken around a small circle in an old oak grove, ranged from their grandma’s backyard to Zion National Park and resulted in a slow-burn discussion about what truly matters and why. The chaperoning literature professor said it was the best he’d seen in ten years.

It’s funny, though, that the more I explore here, the more I open my eyes to the species that I will never find in my grandpa’s field guide. I’ve started to recognize the native Kauri trees with their iconic ringed trunks, unfortunately suffering a similar dieback as my hemlocks. There are Jacarandas with purple flowers, shiny Australian umbrella trees, tall Rātās. The landscapes reveal constellations of old and new, tulip poplars from Maryland’s Schooley Mill Park mixed in with giant hoop-like alien evergreens that I still can’t identify. With time, New Zealand grows familiar. Is that what a home is? Something you can associate with just enough of the things you already love until you find yourself loving it, too? Is it something rooted in the past but weighted with the future? In that case, I carry it with me wherever I go. I believe that our technicolor mosaics of experiences and curly-haired people and plants and sunsets and little kindnesses - an elderly Kiwi man in a bright green sweatband assertively teaching me to play squash yesterday, for example - create something inside us that can’t be forgotten no matter where we go. I have decided that despite the far travel, I am home.

Photo taken by my friend Breton.