January 1, 2012
Picture: Soviet postcard, via vladislava Home Every new year’s eve when I was growing up, my family would gather round the phone while my mum called home. Relatives on the other end took turns giving their greetings and news, my mum slipping in and out of languages, talking fast, making up for the time delay, her voice travelling into the sky and landing somewhere eight time zones away. Afterwards she would repeat the news to my sister and me: births, deaths, storms, parties, emigration. Aside from the occasional letter during the year, these phone calls were all we could know of that place which was more “home” to her than our own cozy house. When I was 12 we travelled there together. A day and a half of planes and buses took us to a town on the edge of a lake between three volcanoes, and “home” was transformed into a real place. This is my school. This where your uncles and I went fishing. This street was washed away in the flood last year. There’s a hot spring under the lake, let’s swim out to it. Here is your uncle. Here is your great aunt. Here is my old school teacher. We called on everyone; we must have visited a hundred people in those few days. The other kids showed us strange games with rubber bands and coins. Dad read books. Mum laughed, sang, talked nonstop. I spent new year’s eve walking in the fields with my cousins, while she sat in the shade with her parents and her brothers. Three days later we were back in the snow, and her home was once more reduced to dusty, crackling exchanges of words. But slowly I came to see what this really meant to her. ~*~ I left Ireland in my early twenties, and 2012 will be my fourth year in Germany. Time passes more quickly with each year, and it becomes ever more apparent to me that we are all living on sand. We build castles; they are slowly washed away. As a physical place, “home” is something constantly shifting and dissolving. Home, for me, is in certain people I know and have known: family, friends, and lovers; in their words and actions, and in the experiences we share before we go our separate ways. Even when I’m alone, I can see how all this has made me what I am. In the past two weeks I’ve been lucky enough to spend time at home, with my family and some of my closest friends. To meet them again is to see the common thread in our lives, that even during our time apart we have been echoing, in different ways, what we had learned together. With all of them, as well as those friends who are far away right now, I hope we’ll meet again soon. ~*~ Today, after the regular 4pm phone call, my mother was crying. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” She was 29 — barely older than I am — when she emigrated for good, during a shadowy time of martial law and guerrilla resistance. There are questions I don’t dare ask her. Happy new year to you all — and may you always have a home, somewhere in the sand.

Picture: Soviet postcard, via vladislava

Home

Every new year’s eve when I was growing up, my family would gather round the phone while my mum called home. Relatives on the other end took turns giving their greetings and news, my mum slipping in and out of languages, talking fast, making up for the time delay, her voice travelling into the sky and landing somewhere eight time zones away. Afterwards she would repeat the news to my sister and me: births, deaths, storms, parties, emigration. Aside from the occasional letter during the year, these phone calls were all we could know of that place which was more “home” to her than our own cozy house.

When I was 12 we travelled there together. A day and a half of planes and buses took us to a town on the edge of a lake between three volcanoes, and “home” was transformed into a real place. This is my school. This where your uncles and I went fishing. This street was washed away in the flood last year. There’s a hot spring under the lake, let’s swim out to it. Here is your uncle. Here is your great aunt. Here is my old school teacher.

We called on everyone; we must have visited a hundred people in those few days. The other kids showed us strange games with rubber bands and coins. Dad read books. Mum laughed, sang, talked nonstop. I spent new year’s eve walking in the fields with my cousins, while she sat in the shade with her parents and her brothers.

Three days later we were back in the snow, and her home was once more reduced to dusty, crackling exchanges of words. But slowly I came to see what this really meant to her.

~*~

I left Ireland in my early twenties, and 2012 will be my fourth year in Germany. Time passes more quickly with each year, and it becomes ever more apparent to me that we are all living on sand. We build castles; they are slowly washed away. As a physical place, “home” is something constantly shifting and dissolving.

Home, for me, is in certain people I know and have known: family, friends, and lovers; in their words and actions, and in the experiences we share before we go our separate ways. Even when I’m alone, I can see how all this has made me what I am.

In the past two weeks I’ve been lucky enough to spend time at home, with my family and some of my closest friends. To meet them again is to see the common thread in our lives, that even during our time apart we have been echoing, in different ways, what we had learned together.

With all of them, as well as those friends who are far away right now, I hope we’ll meet again soon.

~*~

Today, after the regular 4pm phone call, my mother was crying. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” She was 29 — barely older than I am — when she emigrated for good, during a shadowy time of martial law and guerrilla resistance. There are questions I don’t dare ask her.

Happy new year to you all — and may you always have a home, somewhere in the sand.

(Source: sovietpostcards, via vladislava)