Lesson in Life #8: There’s No Place Like Home, But Sometimes You Gotta Roam
Castries, St. Lucia and Buenos Aires, Argentina
Michelle and I are wrapping up our first year writing essays on Substack with two Thanksgiving pieces and a series of BEST OF essays to finish out December. It has been enjoyable and challenging to write an essay each week for 12 months. We really weren’t sure if we could pull off writing together but we feel pretty good about the final results.
As we head into the final weeks of 2021, we want to thank all of you who have supported our work and dreams of sharing our Travels Across America and Lessons in Life essays. Over the next few weeks, we will be contemplating what the future holds for us and will let you all know soon which direction in 2022 we will attempt to go!
Since Michelle and I decided to suddenly “end” Halloween and start Thanksgiving early this year, here is the first of our two essays about Turkey Day. We hope you enjoy them and the upcoming holidays with your family and friends.
I don’t know much for certain.
The older I get, the more I am realizing I will barely scratch the surface of what there is to learn about myself and the world at large with the short amount of time we have on this planet.
However, in 50 years, there are a few lessons I have learned that continue to stand the test of time. One of them is this:
There’s no place like home, but sometimes you gotta roam.
And the thing is, the two points of the lesson often go together. It sometimes takes getting out of your comfort zone and actually leaving home to appreciate its value.
It’s kind of funny and interesting that two of the most memorable Thanksgiving holidays we’ve ever had occurred outside of the United States. There’s something about not being in your own country on a traditional holiday that makes you appreciate everything about it and long for home.
The first Thanksgiving meal we ate not surrounded by family and the Detroit Lions was on our honeymoon in St. Lucia. It was so strange to be sweating in the Caribbean heat instead of freezing in the fall foliage of Virginia. That lovely meal included turkey, stuffing, and some kind of magical wine infused gravy that I will never forget. Our table was placed outside where you could hear the gentle breeze making its way through the palm leaves and the barely perceptible lapping of the sea on the beach nearby. It was a romantic Thanksgiving and the only one I can remember that was held under candlelight.
I also fondly recall the waitstaff of the restaurant at the resort on St. Lucia. They were super kind to us and saying how they imagined we must be missing our family on this American holiday and they were right. Even on our honeymoon for just a week, the absence of friends and family could be felt. Yes, the food is what we remember most years but its the friends and family we think of when they are not around or they are gone from us for this life that is the essence of Thanksgiving.
The second most memorable Thanksgiving for us happened when we were living in South America for a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Again, it was hot. Because they are in the southern hemisphere, the weather was transitioning from Spring to Summer instead of the usual Fall to Winter. The wonderful friends who invited much of the expat community at our school over for Thanksgiving had opened up their backyard pool so the kids were able to swim. Basking in the sun and playing in the water at Thanksgiving was something they had never experienced and would not soon forget.
I remember this particular Thanksgiving as a transition: a moving from one place to another at the friend’s home and in our lives. Because the weather was so nice, the Thanksgiving meal occurred inside and outside the house. There was no solemn formal gathering of everyone at a long table, it was some people eating inside watching one of the NFL games with Spanish commentary, some people eating outside by the pool, and some people eating standing up holding their plates as they bounced from friend to friend inside and outside of the home.
I can also recall the deep longing for home and America that Thanksgiving. Our culture shock had mostly subsided by then but missing our family had not. I had always heard people say that the holidays are the roughest when you have loved ones who are no longer here. That some people even dread the holidays instead of looking forward to them because of the emotional pain of looking around the room and seeing the ones they made a life with gone.
That Thanksgiving, I felt like a selfish fool. None of the people I had spent my life with were gone, but I chose to deliberately move 7,000 miles away from them. I could see them for every holiday if I wanted to, they were all still alive, but I was choosing adventure over family, new over old, mystery over tried and true. It was when that meal was over, Michelle and I determined we would do all in our power to return to Virginia and never take time and meals with family for granted again.
The food our friends in Argentina prepared was delicious. If I recall correctly, turkey wasn’t the easiest thing to come by at that time. Nearly every meal we ever had in Argentina involved some kind of beef and sausage and occasionally chicken. The blending of the American tradition of turkey with the Argentine asado was the best of both worlds that day.
That’s what we always told ourselves that adventure would be: the best of both worlds. We would have family on the holidays and during July in the States, then we would have traveling adventures abroad throughout the rest of the year. We thought we could pull it off as many of the awesome people we worked with in Argentina had done; but, we were wrong.
A few veteran educators cautioned us about traveling home for the holidays during the first year. They warned that it it was too soon to return home to make that decisive cut needed for a life abroad. Going home they said would be tough and could complicate things. We didn’t listen and man, they were right. The LONGEST six months of my life was spent in Argentina returning from the States after the holidays knowing we were coming home for good in June.
I made a calendar to mark and count the 150 days until we’d be back in Virginia. That was one of the worst ideas I have ever had, every day felt like forever. I was a man with one foot in one country and one in another. I wasn’t fully present anywhere.
Sometimes in life we need to roam around and see the rest of the world in order to appreciate what we have at home. No home or country is perfect, but they are ours and they are us.
We hope whether you spend the upcoming holidays at home or traveling, that you will be filled with an appreciation for both.