Coming Home

Home has been a loaded word for me through our many moves. I have come to terms with calling many places home instead of home meaning one location. Yet, as my plane circled the city of Sydney preparing to land three days ago, I found myself crying with the relief of coming home. Even though my parents have spent twice as many years in Australia as I have, they still joke that I am probably the most Aussie member of our family. I grew up here. So while many of my Mennonite Mission Network colleagues prepare to enter new cultures and understand themselves in new languages, I have come home to forms of speaking and culture that are instinctive to me. I have been gone for three years, which is the longest time I have spent away from Australia since I was nine years old.

On the drive home from the airport and on our numerous walks over the last three days I have been stuck by the slight yet significant differences I see and feel from the USA. The first two weeks in a new place always help me to see the place I left and the place I am coming to with a strange kind of clarity. The smells, sounds, sights and tastes of Australia are welcome to my homesick and longing senses. The sizes, shapes and colors of the cars and houses have differences that are hard for me to verbalize and yet they comfort me. I have to stop every once in a while and breathe deeply; flowers, gum trees, the ocean: the smells of home. I find myself giggling or calling out in joy every so often. The dusty grey-green of plants and trees along with the Aussie brands and labels in the cupboard, fill me with a girlish glee and whisper “home”. My eyes are filled with the sights of familiar little shops: bread, fish and chips, flowers, and surf boards. The ocean, so close to my parents’ house that I can feel the pounding of the waves as I lay in bed at night, stretches out with crystal blue vastness. The accents and languages I hear along side the tastes of kebabs, Jatz Biscuits for morning tea, Cadbury’s drinking chocolate, and leatherwood honey; I’m slightly overwhelmed with home.

What will this life hold for me? I am so full of hope and expectation. I am a young woman coming back as an adult to the culture of my childhood. Rooms of my heart that are normally closed to each other are open as I bridge these two cultures I hold so dear. I am at a crossing point, a portal, between my two worlds and cultures. Between being a child and an adult; between being at home and a foreigner in the same place.