Chickens In The Bathroom

Ice Cream, Sunshine, and Blackie

There have always been legitimate excuses for me not to have chickens. Reasons have ranged from the rather exotic (“I live on the 13th floor of an apartment building in Shanghai”) to the mundane (“Chickens aren’t allowed in the Petoskey city limits”).

Yet I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of raising laying hens. I love eggs, and second only to growing a vegetable garden, which I also enjoy and plan to expand on this year, chickens seem like an easy way to get a better grip on food production. I told myself I’d get a few as soon as I could.

“As soon as I could” ended up taking a while. My various reasons for not raising chickens over the years frustrated me, but once we moved to Vermont I found it was easy to hide behind those reasons, too. For months after we moved here, I debated even asking my landlord whether or not he’d allow us to keep a few chickens somewhere on our ten-acre (!) yard. When I finally worked up the courage to ask and he said “Sure! Of course!” I turned my concern to housing; coops seemed too expensive. Then a friend gave me her old one. That problem solved, I worried over the logistics of chicks; should I really invest in a brooder, heat lamp, and feeders? Was I capable of raising them, or would I kill them all? Another friend offered to give me three of her baby chicks as soon as they stopped needing round-the-clock heat lamp care. I took a deep breath. “OK,” I said. “Deal.”

You’d think from all my hesitation that I didn’t actually want chickens. But that’s not it at all. I did want them–I do. It’s just that sometimes, inertia is easier. Sometimes thinking about something is easier than doing it. Sometimes the possibility is easier than the reality. When you’re just imagining something, you can’t mess it up. As soon as you start doing, well…then the mistakes creep in.

As I fretted over chickens, another friend of mine was waffling over switching to cloth diapers. Since I’ve cloth diapered both of my children, I offered my best advice. I realized I’d learned a lot about it over the years, and I knew that the concerns that seemed so overwhelming to her had easy solutions. Finally, she took the plunge and ordered a few cloth diapers. Once they arrived, it took her a few days to start using them. “I kept waiting for the right moment,” she told me later. “I told myself I’d wait until the baby’s rash cleared up. I told myself I’d wait until after the class field trip. Then I finally told myself, ‘Get over it! Just put a diaper on the baby!’”

I knew exactly how she felt. Cloth diapers were to her what chickens were to me (is it worth mentioning that this friend kept no less than twenty chickens in her barn?). I figured, if she could put a diaper on the baby, I could get the chickens.

And I did. I cleaned out a Rubbermaid tote. I bought $2 feeders and waterers, a bag of chicken food, a hunk of sawdust, and a square of hardware cloth at the farm store. Then I went to my friend’s house and came out with a cardboard box that peeped all the way home.

I was convinced they’d die the first night. I dreamed that our cats found their way into the bathroom, that the chickens found their way out. But when I woke up, there they were, peeping away. And a week later, they’re still here.

My kids love to hold them. I’ve figured out how to keep them from flooding their water with pine shavings. My husband and I are debating plans for fencing and runs. Is it hard? Not really. It’s something new, but that’s not actually the same thing. We just let ourselves think it is. Imagining having chickens, of course, was technically easier than actually having them. But it wasn’t very rewarding.

Bringing chickens into my bathroom has taught me a lesson so obvious it feels silly to write down, but I will anyway: The only way to start doing something is to start doing it.

Peep!

How do you know you’re home?

Home–one of them

Have you ever been in that in-between period, perhaps after moving, when “home” doesn’t refer to just one place? Several times a day I casually refer to our new house in Vermont as “home” (“I’m heading home now.” “See you at home.” “Are you stopping by home before you go to the meeting?”), but I’m about to leave for a weekend reunion in Michigan, and whenever I talk about that, I say, “I’m going home to see my friends.” These two invocations of the word seem at once casual and significant: the first refers to the home I have, the second to an idea of home I still feel and cannot simply discard based on changed circumstance.

I’m fascinated by what makes people feel at home in a particular place. Whenever I think the formula is simple–say, where someone grew up–I remember the exceptions: the friend I met in Germany, a transplant from another continent, who had settled definitively on her own in a small village outside the city and felt with admirable certainty that she was at home there; the friend’s sister who’d always felt out of place in her hometown and only settled happily once she moved across the country to a different climate; and even my own parents, who both moved to Michigan from different places but now call it their home above either of their “home” states (I know that took a while).

Home is, of course, defined practically by necessity; it’s wherever you find the job or the house, it’s wherever your immediate family lives. But once we get past the practical and focus on the felt, I’m fascinated by the question: what specific ingredients push a place from “here” to “home?”

Is it familiarity, particular people, or a sense of community, all of which grow over time and can’t be rushed? Positive associations (or the absence of negative associations), which can take root in early childhood? Personal values, which connect a person inextricably to certain elements of a place– presence of extended family, viability of career options? Hobbies (can you hunt and fish here, or can you go to a mall)? My peripatetic lifestyle has brought me to many places, but I haven’t felt at home in all of them– or even in most of them, despite living there.

I know that feeling “at home” is important to human identity. Despite the high mobility possible in our global society, identification with a particular place is grounding. My three-and-a-half year old son, who was quite shaken by our move this summer, still talks frequently about being at home now in Vermont. It’s a definite point of security for him, and I always reinforce it, even though this place is still an evolving home for me.

So yes, I’m going “home” this weekend, but I’m sure when I leave, I’ll say I’m going back “home” too. I’m leaving home to go home, twice in one weekend!

I’d love to hear some comments addressing these questions: Do you feel “at home” where you live? How do you know you’re home? How hard would it be to leave? Could you imagine yourself feeling at home somewhere else? 

The Internet and The Problem of Place

Here, now

Moving to Germany at age 12, and even at age 20, meant writing letters if I wanted any connection to the place I left. It meant waiting– in line to buy stamps, at home for a reply. It usually took about two weeks for an envelope to come back, the airmail stationary so thin it seemed transparent when I held it up to light.

Waiting was hard sometimes; I remember the impatience, the intermittent sadness of missing the people I wrote. But that waiting time served a purpose too: it made me forget. In those weeks between letters, I had no choice but to live exactly where I was. And I did. When I think back on those times, I don’t remember very much pining, except for the moments when letters came or went. I do remember leading my little brother down pine-soaked forest paths until I had them memorized. I remember ordering vegetables for my mother at the market. I remember riding trains through France, Spain, The Czech Republic, leaning my forehead against rattling windows. I remember riding my bicycle to class, flying down the river road. I remember shrieking with laughter the night my floor mates in the dorm taught me how to tend bar. I remember how hard it was, both times, to leave.

My most recent move to Germany was very different. Before we left, I signed up for a Facebook account, telling myself and others that it would be a great way to keep in touch while we were gone. I imagined that Facebook, with its real-time news feed, could somehow make up for the fact that we were no longer going to live within an easy drive of our parents. I rationalized that our son’s frequent visits with his grandparents would be easily replaced by frequent status updates: “Heading downtown to Schlossplatz!” “Eating Brezel at the Biergarten!” Keeping in touch would be so easy, I told myself, it would be like we never left.

But we did leave. And the more I relied on the internet to make it seem like we hadn’t, the more obvious it became. Suddenly, there was no more waiting, no more forced immersion in the physical world. I didn’t need to wait two weeks to establish contact with the people and place I left; all I had to do was sign into my e-mail, log onto Facebook, ring into Skype, and the old world swam into a strange, shimmery kind of e-focus. “So easy!” I told myself. But then why was I so sad?

The internet created a separate world for me, a shadow of the one I’d left that kept me from really living in my new one. Why work hard to establish a strong network of friends when my real ones were “back home”? Why get to know this neighborhood when I can see photos of my old one on anybody’s “wall”? My friends from home, in kindness, still included me on our group e-mails about playdates and snowshoe excursions and teas, and the e-mails popped in often enough that I could pretend they actually applied to me. My son, a toddler when we moved, and his sister, born in Germany, maintained relationships with their grandparents on Skype. I was grateful for the e-mails and the video calls, but knew as I watched my kids lean into the screen, offering bits of food to my parents on the other end, that my original plan had been a farce. I thought the internet would knit up an ocean’s worth of space and make it disappear. Instead, constant electronic exposure to the old “home” only heightened my sense of separation. Staring at home on a screen wasn’t the same as being there, and I knew it.

I wonder sometimes if a little bit more of the waiting that infused my first two trips overseas would have, in the end, made me less homesick. I often felt overwhelmingly grateful for the online tools that kept me in regular touch with people I deeply missed. Yet I also usually logged off of Facebook feeling vaguely depressed and less motivated to engage with my immediate surroundings.

Now that we’ve moved back to the United States, I’m grappling with a new illusion: the idea that simply being on the same continent would be so much easier for our family relationships than living overseas. Realistically, living a 14-hour drive away from Michigan means that our contact with our parents and old friends looks a lot like it did when we lived in Germany. There’s a lot of Skyping, e-mailing, and Facebooking. Sure, it’s a little easier now because we live in the same time zone, and flying here is much less complicated than it was when we lived in Stuttgart. But those differences don’t change the fact that we’re still far away, far removed from daily life in our old community. We have a new community now, and is it hard for me to immerse myself in it? Yes. I miss my old friends and my old town. I worry a lot about what relationships with family will look like, especially as our parents get older. And Facebook remains a fraught tool for me, alternately comforting and maddening.

I don’t think my feelings of displacement are unique; ABC News recently reported on the acronym FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): “Now that you can see your connections’ lives in real time,” writes Sarah Miller, “you are theoretically always missing something…”Joyce Walder’s New York Times article “In Your Face(book): Here’s the party you weren’t invited to” asserts that “now…there are countless opportunities to feel wounded.”

Most often, I work on a daily basis to immerse myself in my new life. I go outdoors, I plan a garden for spring, I take my kids to the library and the swimming pool and the woods, I invite people to my house. But then I slip back. I go online and a photo of my old town pops up; I stare at it longingly, forgetting to look out my own window. I shift between places, stepping gingerly between worlds, delaying immersion in either.

I know it’s possible to strike a balance, to keep in touch without mourning and to love a new place while honoring an old one. We moved pretty recently, and I know that balance takes time. But while I give it a chance to work, I’m making a conscious effort to live where I am.

Sometimes that’s easy. The other day, the kids, dog and I headed into the yard to sled. The sun was thinking about setting, but we had a little light left. I’d been pulling the baby on her sled while my son hurtled down hills on his, but in a moment he handed me his rope, picked up mine, and started pulling his sister across the field. The dog, running ahead, stopped to look back. The moment passed quickly– of course my daughter got cold and started whining, and my son got tired of pulling. But moments like that ground me where I am and help me deepen a sense of place separate from the virtual world. I’m so glad I snapped a picture. I will not, however, be posting it to Facebook.

Almost Abroad, At Home

Oops–I should have learned French!

When we moved back to the U.S., especially the rural U.S., I expected we’d have to sacrifice the stimulation of constant exposure to other languages and cultures. No place has it all, my husband and I learned long ago. Everywhere you live, you’re gaining something and missing something else. I felt confident in our move, but realistic as well. I knew what I’d be giving up, and I felt–still feel–sad sometimes.

The movie Sliding Doors imagines two possible lives unfolding for its main character based on whether or not she steps through a door at a certain time. Following this tiny action (or inaction), two plots play out alongside one another on the screen. Since I’ve lived in so many places, it’s hard not to picture our lives like that– going in one direction or another, moved by choices large or small. One simple decision, for example, and our son would have been going to German school this year. We would have been in the same small apartment, pulling our dog for short walks on his leash down city streets, but instead my son speaks English with his new preschool friends and our dog chases deer in the forest behind our house in the country.

Sometimes it seems random. But I also believe that our choices, when made in good faith, can lead us in exciting directions we couldn’t have anticipated. For example, from our tiny town in northern Vermont it takes just 15 minutes to reach Québec. I had no idea when I moved here that I’d be hearing French chatter in the grocery stores or crossing the border to pick apples at the nearest orchard.

Today’s chilly rain had us packing the car for a little trip to Magog, a town at the north end of Lake Memphremagog. Our town sits on the lake’s southern tip, where it gathers in a wide bay before stretching up into Canada.

Admittedly, it’s exciting to hop in the car and drive a short ways to a world of boulangeries and pâtisseries and people saying Bonjour. I thought I left that behind when I left Europe. Yet it appears I really might have been given the best of two worlds.

I’ve studied three languages in my lifetime, and none of them have been French. Is that random? A stroke of bad luck? Or could it just mean that I’ve been given the opportunity to enrich my life with a fourth language to study and the chance to embrace two cultures at once after all? I pick the latter.

The Moving Anti-Queen

My living room, courtesy of our latest move

I’ve moved more than you have. Seriously, I’m sure of it. Every single year for the past 15 years, I have moved into a new place (usually throwing in a new city, state, or even country for good measure…I mean, if you’re going to move, make it count, right?).

It’s sort of hard even for me to believe, and I’m the one who did it. But starting at age 19, I moved into a new dorm room every year throughout four years of college in Iowa. That’s pretty normal, OK. But then came my rented room in Chicago. Then an apartment in Ann Arbor. Then my parents’ house in East Lansing. Then Apartment #1 in China. Apartment #2 in China. Apartment in Bolivia. Cabin in Petoskey. House in Petoskey. In-laws’ house in Harbor Springs. Apartment #1 in Germany. Apartment #2 in Germany. Yup, that’s 15. 15 years, 15 moves.

And you know what? It hasn’t gotten any easier. In fact, it’s gotten harder, because now I have two kids under three, which means that every task takes at least five times as long as it ordinarily would. I haven’t gotten better at organizing, packing, selling, cleaning. I’ve gotten worse. To those of you seeking advice for how to cushion the blows dealt by moving, the only advice I can offer is to avoid it in the first place.

The irony is that while I’ve moved more than most people, I also seem to hate moving more than most people, certainly more than my husband, who previously never seemed to care whether he was living out of a tent, house, suitcase, apartment, or van. I, on the other hand, find moving so emotionally jarring that it almost drives me insane every time. I blame my wrinkles on moving, which is certainly convenient.

Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about whether or not I’ve enjoyed living in the diverse places I’ve called home. I’m a richer person for it, and so on. I’m just talking about the physical act of assembling and disassembling stuff, the discomfort of transitioning between one place and another.

A New York Times editor wrote an essay in which he explained the toll that his “serial moving” habit had taken. “For someone who hates to move,” he writes, “I’ve moved a lot: six times in the past 14 years.” Many of those moves, as I read on, happened within New York City. My first reaction was, “Please. I’ll see you six moves in 14 years and raise you nine moves plus three continents.” My second reaction was, “Now, why am I not in The New York Times?“

It was a great essay, of course. The writer pondered our connection to “stuff” (granted, moving would be so much easier if we didn’t feel compelled to take it all with us, right?). “I like my stuff,” he writes. ”Not all of it is freighted with significance, yet much of it — books, snapshots, drafts of novels, short stories — gives me clues about who I was, who I am now and where I’ll go from here.”

And it’s not just the trappings of materialistic adulthood. When we sold our first item in preparation to move, my three-year-old, whom we had dutifully been prepping on the plans (“First we will move out of our apartment in Germany. Then we will fly across the ocean to Michigan. Then we will drive to Vermont.”) threw himself on the ground and screamed: “Where is my coat rack?!” His reactions have softened since then, but I think that initial distress represented some basic urge to have predictability, everything in its right place.

Not everyone has this luxury, of course. For plenty of people, moving is a part of life, not up to choice as it has been for us. Hats off to these folks, and my sympathies. It’s hard. I think there’s a reason psychiatrists count moving as a major life stressor. We humans might crave adventure and excitement, but we also crave stability.

Even my husband, the former van dweller, has now finally reached his “moving max.” He is done, he says. He knows how I feel. No more moving! he declares. This. Is. It!

I believe it is, but not everyone is so sure. As my mother-in-law pointed out, “You do have a track record.”

Point taken. Check back with me in a year!

Essay Published on Matador Network: Raising Third Culture Kids

For the past several months I’ve been working, as part of the Glimpse Correspondents Program, on two long-form essays discussing my life as an expat and specifically, my continual search for homes away from home. I was lucky to have as my editor Sarah Menkedick, a terrific creative non-fiction writer and editor at Matador Network. Sarah is the main inspiration behind my recent Write It Sideways article extolling the virtues of great editors.

My first essay, “Raising Third Culture Kids,” was published today. I’ve closed comments here, but feel free to hop over to the Glimpse site and comment there!

Poem on the Bus

Waiting for the bus…and the poems.

In Stuttgart the busses and trains are full of poems. They paste them on the walls above the seats and I like to read them, partly because I love poetry, partly because I love German, and partly because I really need to keep practicing my German and reading poems in transit is an efficient way to do it amid the flurry of life with two small children.

We don’t have a car and sometimes I’m short on reading time, so I spend a lot of time on our neighborhood bus and I’ve treasured many of these poems. I always mean to google them when I get home and save them somewhere special, but I usually forget. The bus poems are one of the many things I will miss when we leave Germany this June. My husband has received a truly ideal job offer as a school principal in a region of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. We are excited to move our young family there; the area has captured our imaginations and I’m sure our hearts will be quick to follow. However, we’re now steeped in the craziness of moving ourselves, two kids, and a dog back across the ocean. The many tasks are mind-numbing and hard to balance against our natural desire to make the most out of every moment here before we leave.

With this job offer, our time in Germany, but also our time of living in many different places, comes to a close. We will always love to travel, but living, settling, is different, and that will now happen in Vermont. A lot of people have good-naturedly said things like, “well, here you go again!” I don’t blame them, but we are entering into this move the way you enter into a marriage. It’s not a step to anywhere but itself. And while this is a good thing, it naturally makes me reflect on the many moves that precede it.

I’ve lived on four continents in my adult life, more than I ever thought I’d even see. It has been my good fortune but also my heartache. A character in one of John Cheever’s many strange and wonderful stories says, “When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.” The statement rung partly true but also puzzled me until today, when I realized that in my case, the things in myself I always look for are, in fact, the pieces of myself which have surprisingly grown and taken hold in all the different places I’ve lived, and which will never leave me.

All this brings me to my all-time favorite bus poem, written by Rutger Kopland, which I saw again this week. I read it in German, of course, and only learned after finally remembering to google it that Kopland is from the Netherlands and it was originally written in Dutch.

Here, then, is my own translation of the translation:

“Going Away”
by Rutger Kopland

Going away is something different
than slipping out of the house,
gently closing the door
behind that which you are,
and not coming back.
You remain someone
who is waited for.

Going away you can describe
as a type of staying. Nobody
waits, because you are still there.
Nobody says goodbye
because you are not going away.

If Kopland has it right, which I think he does, my nostalgia makes sense. Wherever I go, a small part of me lives elsewhere too, and probably always will.