Redefining Home, Part 1: On Homesickness, Culture Shock, and Weather Patterns

It’s October.

October is my favorite month. I spent 34 years of my life in Michigan, which has gorgeous Octobers. Gorgeous autumns, that is.

The same way Lorelai Gilmore can smell snow coming, I can smell autumn. You wake up one morning, and it’s there—a change in the air. You can feel it on your skin. You pull your favorite sweatshirt out of the closet for the first time since April, track down a fleece jacket. Cozy socks.

Autumn is apple orchards and cider mills, corn mazes and hay rides, bonfires in backyards and homecoming football games. It’s cinnamon-and-sugar-dusted doughnuts, pumpkin patches, and cups of hot mulled cider. It’s pots of chili on the stove and brilliant blue or heavy grey skies with low-hanging clouds. It’s Lake Michigan turned pewter, Sunday drives on country roads lined with jewel-toned trees, fresh venison filling the freezer. It’s maple leaves turned brilliant red and Apple Betty, eaten warm from the oven.

Autumn never lasts long enough for me.

And here I am, stranded in summer, in this foreign land they call the Mid-South, where cars brake at green lights and no one uses their turn signal, where there’s a dearth of mom-and-pop ice cream shops and nowhere to get a good breakfast. Where everyone says, “Yes, ma’am,” which makes me feel weird and formal and not-at-home. Where the humidity can be so thick it feels like the world is one big sauna. And where there’s no October. At least not the October I know and love. There have been some cooler days, finally, but this week’s forecast is predicting temps in the mid-80s again. And no sign of changing leaves.

I never dreamed I’d be homesick at 40. At least not homesick for a place or a season. When we moved to Northern Virginia three years ago, I missed my friends. I missed the lakeshore. But Virginia has four seasons. It has autumn. It has apple orchards and red maples and that same smell in the air. Autumn arrives maybe a week or two later than in Michigan, but still, in Virginia there is October. They have autumn here in Memphis “sometimes,” I’ve been told. Sometimes the leaves turn color for a week or two before they fall. “But it’s nothing like up north,” they say.

I feel like I have Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder, if that can even be considered a thing. The blazing hot midday sun has begun to depress me.

When we first arrived here, I invented a hashtag for myself: #yankeeinmemphis. It started out humorously, as a way of poking fun at myself for all the nuances of southern life and behavior I was experiencing for the first time, but I’m amazed at how accurately it’s come to reflect the way I feel—like a fish out of water, to use a tired cliché.

Until we got here, I didn’t know my roots ran so deep. I didn’t know how much “home,” to me, was the Midwest.

It’s made me think a lot about all the women I know who live a few years here, a few years there, never really getting a chance to put down roots—my sister, for example. She’s an Air Force wife. How, I wonder, do they do it? Do they secretly thrive on change and new places? Do they just buck up because it’s the life they signed up for? Or do they sometimes cry in the shower, like me?

I wonder if Sarah ever cried over Harran. If Ruth ever cried over Moab. The Bible doesn’t say they did, but there’s a part of me that suspects there may have been some tears shed. How could there not be?

So how do you get by when you’re 40 and homesick and culture shocked in your own country, when the place you’re in feels like a pair of too-tight underwear and the people around you may as well be speaking a foreign language because they simply can’t understand why you don’t think an eight-month-long summer is a wondrous thing?

I’ve been asking myself this question for weeks, maybe even months, trying to figure out a way to be okay with the here and now. I have so much to be thankful for: my sweet family, a job I love, a cozy little house to live in. And surely—surely—God is doing something here. God is always doing something,

So now, my question is changing. Instead of asking myself how I’m going to get by, I’m asking God what He’s up to. I’m asking Him what “home” is. [Tweet “I have a feeling home isn’t what we think it is, not by God’s definition.”]

More to come.

~Harmony

Photo Credit: Julie Falk. License: Creative Commons 2.0.