Little boxes, little boxes......

This past weekend Omaha exploded.  No seriously.  Fireworks are legal here.  All kinds.  Huge kinds.  We lit one called ‘The Widowmaker” at a lake this past weekend that cut open the chin of the boy who set it off.  And on our drive back to town the skyline was not simply dotted at a point by the city fireworks show….it was lit up by every neighborhood’s firework show.  Correction, every backyard’s firework show.  You could turn 360 at any time between 9:30 and midnight and see streaks of red, white and blue in the skyline-- sizzling, whistling and crackling.  When we went to sleep on Friday it sounded like D-day in our neighbor's yard and there was no sign of a stalemate by Sunday night……shit is intense.

But as of right now.......I’m sitting with my feet in a manicured lawn in a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska.  I am afraid to appear that I am too relaxed or content with the sun on my face for fear that it will illuminate that we are not destitute and therefore not in need of our gracious benefactor.  So I will sit here in the sun and secretly curl my toes around the blades of grass and smile on the inside at our good fortune. 

This is a good time to express how incredibly lucky we have been in Omaha so far.  A week before we came out here we found out that the Ronald McDonald house was full and we were 6^th on the waiting list.  We were envisioning spending our savings on hotels next to the hospital for the foreseeable future and refilling our cooler with frozen chips from the ice machine when Codie’s mom, Deb, rushed in to the rescue.  Her oldest friend from- Armstrong, Iowa- lives in Omaha and offered up her house for the summer while she moved in with her mother three doors down.  We scored.  And her lawn is manicured.  My toes are enmeshed with it.

Which does not say it does not come without it’s strangeness.

Omaha is America’s “test city”.  A test city since it is supposed to model the same demographics of the U.S. proportionately.  For being America’s test city it also seems to emulate our race relations across the nation as there seems to be a clear divide between cultures and privilege depending on where you live in town and the color of your skin.  Our neighborhood is white, white and more white with a heaping spoonful of WASP.  There was a 4^th of July parade that looked like it fell out of Martha Stewart Living and landed on a Hollister store.  The women all wore red white and blue scarves with their capris and the men wore peach shorts with plaid shirts.  And, sure, we are white too.  But this is white upperclass culture squared with luncheons at the clubhouse.   Warren Buffet lives close to the neighborhood (which, by the way, is our new drinking game.  Everyone in Omaha will mention how amazing the zoo is or that Warren Buffet lives here within five minutes of meeting them if they hear you are visiting).

And this is how my feet ended up on this incredible lawn…..there are no gardens in this neighborhood.  Only lawns.  Miles and miles of lawns.  All the same height.  All vibrantly green.

            This is not to say that our hosts are snooty or stuck up.  Nancy, the woman whose house we are staying at, is a saint.  She gives and gives and gives…not just to us but to people biking through town who raise money for cancer (she offered up her mom’s basement to them) and to our family by inviting us to go out to their lake house and with offers to give us tours of Omaha. 

And not to say we are not incredibly thankful.  Although I did plan on writing the great American novel about the Ronald McDonlad house I will be content to hear stories from some other families in our program (plus the Ronald McDonald house allows no food or alcohol in your rooms…they do room checks!). We are truly fortunate.

            In the same breath…..I miss Eugene and have a new appreciation of Deb’s situation when she moved to be with us two years ago.  She said she felt uprooted and disconnected.  She felt like people were plenty nice and asked her questions but she constantly felt like an interloper.  This is our existence so far.  Our hosts have been astoundingly kind and engage me in conversations about Mabel and the weather in Oregon.  But I find myself sensing their obligation and slinking back into the lawns to play with Mabel and Nico to spare everyone the need to spread their arms further. 

“Sit. Feast on your life”  wrote Nobel-winning poet Derek Walcott when he wrote beautifully about being at home in ourselves.  But is that enough?   Where do we find that place to make a home in ourselves.

I’m reading a book by David Whyte and he writes:

“To feel as if you belong is one of the great triumphs of human existence — and especially to sustain a life of belonging and to invite others into that… But it’s interesting to think that … our sense of slight woundedness around not belonging is actually one of our core competencies; that though the crow is just itself and the stone is just itself and the mountain is just itself, and the cloud, and the sky is just itself — we are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile, and that the ability to turn your face towards home is one of the great human endeavors and the great human stories.

It’s interesting to think that no matter how far you are from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society — that, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don’t feel at home in the world — to say exactly how you don’t belong — and the moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already taking the path back to the way, back to the place you should be.
You’re already on your way home.”

So I’ll take that….and start my journey back home now.

Miss you all if you’re reading this (and not at all if you’re not!  Bam!  Ha!)