Homecoming

As soon as travel restrictions lift, I hold my breath and buy an airline ticket home to Minnesota. My friends and family push obligations aside to spend time with me and my son. We visit local attractions that have grown mythical in my mind. They understand me when I say, “You know that State Park up north where I jumped from the rocks into the river,“ and “It’s hard to find good soft serve in Germany,” and “Boy, have I missed you.” They quench my thirst for home.

I enjoy spending an hour with an operator on the phone because I understand every single word despite the bad connection. In Germany, I can order a Milchkaffee fluently one day, then am paralized on the phone the next. Despite years of German classes and being a language teacher myself, I still take notes before conducting any phone calls in German. It’s the letters that get me, the letter i in German is pronounced like the letter e in English. 

That’s my jet-setting lifestyle abroad: eternally praying no one on the other end of the phone asks me to spell my name. But I do it, I always do it. I spell my name, I make my appointments, I talk to my neighbors and friends in German. I do it everyday, all with chest pounding, all while grabbing onto the strings of German grammar exercises stored somewhere in my brain.

It’s like I’m a tree whose roots help me to stand tall in a storm. I may look fragile with my little leaves dangling in the air, like the time a German corrected my English insisting that there was no such thing as light black, the correct word is grey. I don’t let this get me down anymore. I have a grounding in a messy, mysterious, and very indirect upper mid-west culture that I am still trying to figure out. Like anyone, there is so much more to me than what you see. Our roots span oceans.

It’s not a glamorous life abroad, but little by little, I chip out an understanding of a language and culture that is not my own and work at finding my own little place within it. 

This was especially true during the pandemic. I felt like I was the only one still smiling under my mask in Germany. All the restrictions made people quite depressed and fearful. Everything besides pharmacies and grocery stores were closed for months on end. I heard of police giving tickets to groups of people in the park. You got ugly looks or comments if you accidentally walked too close to someone.

As a result, it is a dream being in Minnesota during the summer 2021 pandemic pause. There are no more mask mandates and everything is open. I have brunch with a friend (without my son as grandma can watch him!), we go to the beach with my son, we try the new ice cream shop, we watch a boat come in, we eat at a food truck, and in the evening a bonfire. I know where to go, what to say, how to get there, and where to park, no appointments or Covid tests needed. I am on top of the world! 

I take my son hiking in the bluffs overlooking my hometown. He breathlessly follows the blue markings to stay on the trail. At the top, he extends his plastic pirate telescope. We spy the steeple of the church where I was baptised, my old middle school–now a construction site for townhomes, and of course, the river that flows into the lake and eventually the ocean. 

The truth is that I only learned of this hiking path once I had left to live abroad. A friend showed it to me on one of my trips home. I don’t know what I miss more: Minnesota as it was when I left, or the sunny, idealized, water-carved land with nice people and no lines that I dream of when spending two hours waiting to see the doctor in Germany. 

My trip home cannot last forever nor can the US’s summer pandemic pause. Cases are going up. Summer will end and events will move back inside. It was a more restricted life in Germany 2020-2021, but it was not torture. The rules saved lives.

But right now I exhale. I exhale all the stress, fear, and feelings of inadequacy.

As an expat, my chest is always heavy. I must carry home around with me at all times. 

From the top of the bluff, I take it all in, in big delicious gulps, stalking up for yet another year abroad and another year in the post Covid world.