Home Amongst the Lilacs

Behind our apartment building runs a pedestrian path that takes us wherever we need to go. At least twice a day it holds the weight of our walking feet and supports us until we reach our destination. Sometimes the path is quiet and clad in snow. Sometimes it is glazed over in a thick layer of ice that makes the journey more treacherous. Sometimes it is crawling with ants and other critters, or cluttered with acorns and maple leaves. Sometimes the path is crowded with children riding bikes or trikes or kicking balls. Sometimes it holds Saturday-night lovers strolling slowly and indefinitely in a haze of romance. Some days it patiently guides angry youngsters off towards better places. Some days, like today, it is lined with freshly blossomed lilacs, so intoxicatingly fragrant that one cannot help but stop and drink their seductive aroma. Once a year, for two short weeks or so the path dons its floral lilac glory, marking the start of summer.

Yet another summer in Sweden. My, how the years fly by. In two moths time it will be six years since I first laid eyes on this amazing country, and four years since I have been calling it my home. Home is where the heart is, they say. For a long time I have been yearning to live in a place that is my all, my whole and only home. I am impressed by how well I have managed to establish myself here, but lately I have had an uncomfortable feeling creep up on me. A slight murmur in my stomach that I have been willing away, ignoring, mistaking for hunger. No, I will not listen to you. Sweden is my home and only home. Murmur. Grumble. No, not dissatisfaction. No, not that, but perhaps a realization that by defiantly setting up camp here I have neglected to acknowledge the other places in this world that are my home. As much as I yearn for a place to call my one and only, there is no denying that I am a child with many homes. Sometimes it is a beautiful thing to feel at home in so many corners of this world, and sometimes it is the most unsettling, ribcage-shatteringly painful feeling I know. The feeling of being utterly unconsolidated. Who and where am I? What is me and what is memory? The murmur can best be described as a mixture of nostalgia and an existential panic to collect myself before it's too late. 

It is okay to be homesick for Hawaii? Is it okay to feel really German today, though I usually can't identify with that side of myself at all? It is okay to choose to write a school-paper in English rather than Swedish for the first time since moving here? Of course it's okay, why wouldn't it be? Is it okay to drown in the scent of lilacs and hear their caressing whisper "there, there, you're home," and simultaneously shed tears of longing for the plumerias growing in another garden I once played in? Some days I feel enriched by my many experiences of home, and other days I feel utterly lost, alienated in a world where everyone else seems to know exactly where home is. Home is where the heart is... like the heart of a dandelion, picked by an innocent young girl playing in a meadow and blown *pufff* away into the wind to be strewn as far and in as my directions as possible.

In these periodic feelings of homelessness I find that the most powerful pathfinder is music. Some melodies have followed me since my childhood and they are they same today as then, regardless of climate or temperature. Pictures fade, trinkets break or disappear, scents are fleeting but music is forever. This makes me recall a tune we once sang in round in highschool:  "All things shall perish from under the sky, music alone shall live, never to die." Oh, the little wisdoms our teachers carefully instilled into us. 

The days come and go, and today home is a quirky and colorful apartment right behind the lilac-clad path just as much as it is on a tropical beach in the middle of the pacific ocean, just as much as it is in a random catholic town in southern Germany, just as much as it is off the side of a swamp in Florida, just as much as it is in a redwood forest in California. Home is where my parents are (all of them), where my grandparents are, where my sister is, where my partner is, where my partner isn't, where I am and where I am not. Yes, it is beautiful to feel home in a oak, in a lake, near the sea, up in the mountains and pulsing through me with every heartbeat for all the people, places and things I hold near and dear. But sometimes I wish that home didn't have to be so intangible and so very spread out. 

The lilacs are only here for a few weeks and then the path behind our home will take on a new scent, rose perhaps? Not quite the same ones as the roses in my parents garden in Hawaii, nor the same roses my grandfather grows in Germany. Not the roses we gave each other on Valentine's Day when we were little kids in Florida, or the roses I received after performing on a stage in California. Well, just as the path behind our apartment is constantly changing, is my scrapbook of "home" growing thicker and thicker.