An Ode to England

Dave and me, March 2017

Just off Palace Green, in Durham

I intended this blog as a reflection on life in another country -- specifically England, where Dave and I've made our home for more than two years. But "Wuthering Yankee" soon became a different creature than the one I had planned; the political landscape of late 2016 and so far of 2017 seemed to require my looking back -- at my roots in the United States, at the people and places I came from before I landed on this other shore of the Atlantic.

Today's post will be my last for "Wuthering Yankee." In honor of my original purpose for this blog,  and in honor of my adopted country, I've decided to sign off with a list of what I've come to love about England.

Here it is, then, in no particular order:

1. The walking culture. Everyone walks in England. Tiny tots who would almost surely be in strollers,* in the U.S.; old frail-looking people with canes; schoolkids on their way to and from school; teenagers on dates; middle-aged couples headed to parties. At all hours of the day, when I look out my windows onto Albert Street, there is at least one person walking up or down our long hill.

I love the walking culture because it encourages a lighter carbon footprint. I love it because it encourages overall good health, for people of all shapes, sizes, and ages. I love it because it fosters a sense of community, too. The center of Durham, thick with shops and restaurants and pubs, is also thick with people. You almost always run into someone you know, while you're walking in town or doing your shopping.

Typical summer day in Durham

Too, you almost always hear at least one street busker -- often four or five, in a given walk -- singing or playing guitar, or trombone, or the bagpipes.

The pedestrian culture also makes such features as the Durham Market and the Saturday outdoor market -- which happens all year round, in all weather -- viable enterprises. People arrive at both markets on foot; the markets are big, friendly, pedestrian spaces right here in the center of town.

All the pedestrians out and about in our town gives Durham a sense of vibrancy and face-to-face engagement that seems hard to find in many U.S. towns of this size.

2. All the footpaths. England is threaded with footpaths, which cut through all kinds of property -- public, private, farm- or business-owned -- and are open to everyone. (You just make sure to close the gate firmly behind you, if you're walking through a cow or sheep pasture.) In my experience, these paths -- even the ones that cut through deep woods or along lonely cliffs -- are well maintained. And people use them. On footpaths alone, you can walk the length and breadth of the country in 100 ways. So far, I've mainly used footpaths as a shortcut to a friend's house or for an afternoon's jaunt, but it's also a common practice to use them for week-long walking tours or walking vacations. I can't think of a better way to see the country.

One of the many footpaths

outside of Durham.

3. Carry bags. (Re-usable shopping bags.) My impression is that every household in England owns several of these. You hang them on the coat rack beside the door, and take them with you whenever you're shopping. Yes, you do see some people carrying groceries or other purchases in plastic bags, but it's much rarer than in the U.S. It's assumed here that you'll bring your own re-usable bag. ("Do you need a bag?" clerks sometimes ask, and if you do, they charge you five pence for one.)

4. No clothes driers, no ACs. Surely there are some, in some houses, but it's far from the norm. It's another way that I see people in England living out their ecological concerns.

It's true that the climate of England makes it easier for most people to live without air-conditioning than it would be in much of the U.S. (Here, opening a window is often the most you need to do!) On the other hand, the English weather would seem a real obstacle to drying your clothes on a rack or a clothesline. But everyone whose house I've seen in England does find a way to do this.

5. The weather. Seriously. English weather gets a bad rap in general. Yes, it's fairly rainy. Yes, it's hard to guarantee that, even at the peak of summer, you'll ever have a really hot, jump-in-the-swimming-pool day, at least here in the North of England. But I find the overall climate to be very mild and unstressful. So it rains some. You wear a raincoat, or carry an umbrella. (Really, most English people don't seem to mind a little drizzle falling onto their heads. I'm often breaking out my umbrella when everyone else on the street is still walking along, uncovered.) But the English rain passes quickly. It's rarely a downpour. A typical day, in my experience, involves waves of sun and cloud and light rain breaking over the land at gentle intervals.

Speaking of temperate weather:

Here's a tree blooming in late December!

Maybe it's just me, but after having grown up in the heat and humidity of North Carolina summers -- then having lived through ten years of Chicago winters -- I find the temperature of Northern England to be quite mild. Highs in 70s / 20s (F/C) in the summer; lows in the 30s / 0s (F/ C) in the winter: You do get four different seasons, but none of them slam you.

6. The general attitude toward the weather. No one, as mentioned above, really seems to mind a little rain. They just have the appropriate clothes for it. They go right out into the wet. I've been at backyard barbecues where it started to rain, and everyone just carried on barbecuing and eating and standing around in the rain. Similarly, the winter months don't turn Durham into a ghost town, with everyone hunkered inside. The outdoor markets continue; there is outdoor seating (with heat lamps) year round. People just sit out there, having their pint of ale or their fish and chips, in their coats and hats.

I really do love this -- this straight-on engagement with, or defiance of, local inclement weather. You get the impression that people around here are pretty well acclimated or adapted to their environment.

Outdoor eating (and drinking!) in midwinter.

7. The railways. Just as the country is threaded with footpaths, so too it is webbed with rail lines. It's an efficient, environmentally friendly, generally low-cost and stress-free way to get yourself almost anywhere in the UK. Driving to London from Durham, for example, takes five hours if you're lucky -- the last hour of that through dense suburban traffic -- but Dave and I can walk from our house to the train station in five minutes and catch a train that will take us to London in under three hours. Plus, rather than having to keep your eyes on to the road, you get to sit back and look out the train window.

Dave and I have not owned a car since 2003. This has had much to do, obviously, with where we have lived: Guatemala City, Chicago, and now Durham, England. In this country, I love that I can get almost anywhere I want to by train -- or by some combination of train / bus / metro. Some of my favorite trips recently have been to visit my friend Marta, who rented a summer cabin in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, or to visit the seaside resort town of Saltburn with my friend Jo -- two trips I made by train.**

Marta and I at the Dumfries rail station.

Jo and I touring Saltburn-by-the-Sea

8. I could go on and on about what I love in this place. Hen and stag parties on weekend nights in the streets of Durham and Newcastle. Mushy peas. Extremely well-behaved dogs. How the sea is never more than 50 miles away, wherever you go in England. Swans on the rivers. How people in this part of the country say "aye" and "ta" ("yes" and "thank you"). Bubble and squeak and white bait on the menu. Kids playing on beaches -- in their coats and Wellies -- all year round. Dave's happiness teaching at Durham University, and how the kids in his classes really like and appreciate him -- despite (or possibly because of) his rigor as professor! University students walking to around in the twilight in black tie and evening dresses. Pub culture. The grocer on North Road who yells about his fruit for sale. An eleventh-century castle and a World Heritage Site-listed cathedral in view out my living room window.

It's not perfect, of course. Of course, no place is. But I feel lucky and grateful to have landed, at least for now, in this windy, friendly, rain-and-sun-mottled sweet green corner of the globe.

View out our window: train on the viaduct, cathedral behind the winter tree.

A hen do! (The stag do's look equally entertaining.)

Me in the North Sea: It was chilly!

* They're called "pushchairs," in the UK. Can I just say that I love this?
** Also, doesn't this look like one of the most fun ideas ever -- to hop on a sleeper car in London one night and wake up in the Scottish Highlands?

Roots and Shoots: Or, Moving Forward by Looking Back

The week that Donald Trump was elected president of the U.S., I started writing this blog.

. . . or, tearing my hair

like a repressed '50s housewife?

Outside of throwing up, tearing my hair out like an Old Testament prophet, or remaining permanently in the fetal position I assumed on the morning of November 9, 2016, I couldn't think of what else to do. I am, after all, a writer. Why not try to write my way through the angst and grief I was feeling?

I didn't have much of a plan beyond that, but I did think this blog would focus on the present moment -- the present moment in U.S. politics, and the present moment in my life as a U.S. expatriate in England. While I gradually became more and more at home here in England, I thought I might have something to say about understanding and living with cultural differences. As someone who's spent time in various countries over the years, I thought I might also have something to say about tolerance, openness, seeing life from someone else's perspective.

Last November, I thought this might be the best response I could make to the fact that approximately half the voters in my native country thought Trump should be president.

But a strange thing happened along the way.

I meant to write about England -- about my present life here, about my future on this side of the Atlantic. But instead, nine times out of ten, I found myself looking back.

Many of these posts on "Wuthering Yankee" have been about my youth or my childhood. Or they've reached farther back, to my parents' lives -- or to the lives of my uncles and aunts, or to my grandparents' lives. None of this was part of the original vision, insofar as I had one.

I haven't been home since the 2016 elections, but in the past year the U.S. has become a wildly volatile and -- if I've reading the news from there correctly -- a wildly unhappy place. In some ways, my homeland has come unmoored. Jumped the tracks. Lost its center. All sorts of unsettling metaphors seem to apply, and for a cogent, thoughtful description of the sense of derealisation many of us have felt during these first months of the Trump presidency, I urge you to read my friend Emily Sinclair's brilliant essay in Empty Mirror.

A political moment like this one, in which many U.S. Americans no longer feel at home in their own country -- when we feel deeply opposed to many of our own government's policies, deeply opposed to the alliances and ideologies of our president -- is also, perhaps necessarily, a moment of reckoning. If we feel alienated from our own country, who are we, then? Where does our identity lie?

"Remember who you are and whose you are," my mother admonished me, all through my teens, whenever I walked out the front door. She said it so often, I heard the sentence sometimes in my sleep. As a very young woman striving for autonomy, I did not love this invocation. I wanted to move forward -- out into the ever broadening world -- and my mother, I thought, only wanted me to look back: Who were my people? How had they shaped me? As I moved further out and further away from my family of origin and my original community, how would their legacies inform my life choices?

My family, at about the time my mother

started telling me to remember.

These were questions I wasn't much interested in. Not till recently, anyway.

In the past 10 months of writing this blog, I see now that I've been doing essentially what my mother urged me to do, all those years ago as I left home. I've been remembering who I am, and whose I am.

In the midst of great political instability in the U.S., I've looked to ground or re-ground myself by remembering the place that I come from. By "place" I don't mean a physical place, necessarily. I mean more of a spiritual, or philosophical, one. A place where guests are always welcome at the dinner table, where lending a helping hand is second nature, and where traveling to different parts of the world is not so much an excuse to indulge yourself and your senses as it is a chance to meet people from and learn about those other parts of the world.

I'm still so grateful that my parents took me and my 

sister Linda to Nigeria when we were 3 and 5. 

It's one of my earliest and most formative memories.

Ten months after I started this blog, I see that what I most needed -- out of the volatile mix of rage and heartbrokenness that I felt after the U.S. elections -- was to celebrate the culture of love and acceptance that shaped me from before my birth.

It's not a terribly radical or politicized response to the troubling context in the U.S. I acknowledge that. But before we can speak truth to power, we have to know - to feel firmly grounded in -- to remember -- what our own truths are. 

I plan to end this blog soon, probably after my very next post, in early September. I may have come to the juncture where I've looked back enough -- at least for now -- and am ready to orient forward. One event that's pulling my attention forward right now is the publication of my first book, Day of All Saints, forthcoming from Miami University Press on November 1.

It's thrilling, of course, to see a book take shape -- to see your own messy manuscript pages become, well, a real thing, with a beautiful cover. I'm so grateful to Jeff Clark of Quemadura Designs for the thoughtful cover he created for Day of All Saints. Can you see, underneath the flowers, that there's a photograph -- somewhat ghostly? The photo is of a young guerrilla soldier in the Ixcán, the region of Guatemala where part of the story takes place.* 

I finished writing Day of All Saints in the final months of 2016. I revised it, with much help from the good people at Miami U.P., through the past winter and spring. In the background always was the despair-inducing news from the Trump White House. It's been enough, sometimes, to paralyze any sane, thinking person. And sometimes I've been paralyzed.

But delving back into the place I come from, as this blog allowed me to do, has been a way to draw strength for the day's work. Recalling the people I come from --  people who emphasize love of the Other, and being unafraid of the world's differences -- has been one way to keep pushing forward, even in the face of the anger and despair that news from my home country has stirred up routinely this year.

Remember who you are and whose you are. I'd never have guessed, decades ago -- as my mother shouted this sentence at my departing back, every time she got a chance -- that looking back in this way would give me energy when I most needed it. That it would re-ground me when I felt most ungrounded. This year of all years -- this first year of the Trump presidency -- I do remember my spiritual roots: Anabaptism, pacifism, activism for a more socially just world. I do remember my philosophical home: a place where I have no more or less right to sit down at the table than anyone else on this planet.

I look backward -- sometimes: like this -- to ultimately keep looking forward.


* I'm excited to talk about Day of All Saints and to share it with anyone who's interested. Early next winter, I'll return to the U.S. for a short book tour, and if you're in conversation with me on Facebook or Twitter, you'll hear plenty about it -- perhaps more than you want! -- over the coming months. And it's available now for pre-order at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Amazon UK.

Back to the Yoga Mat, Back to the Desk: On Going Deeper

Dave and me in Guatemala, at about the time of the 

"I like you" incident.
(If only we could have kept our eyes open!)

12 or 13 years ago, when we lived in Guatemala and worked in the same building, my husband Dave was working on a piece of writing. He does this every day of his life -- literally: Dave is a writing machine -- so why does this one instance stand out in my memory?

His work that day must have been short and not too biblically specific,* because he brought a draft of it down to my office and asked, "What do you think of this?" I ran my eye over the page. I don't remember what my problem was, exactly, with what he had written, but I looked up from my desk and said to him, "Well, I like you."

Dave had the good grace to laugh at this response. I laughed, too, once I heard how it sounded. It's since become a catchphrase, whenever one of us asks the other for feedback on a perhaps questionable idea.

("Do you think we should adopt a cat?" or "What do you think of putting just one more houseplant in this room?" Answer: "Well, I like you.")

Some might say that we have enough

houseplants already.

It's hard to give criticism to someone you love. It's hard to give criticism, period. (I mean criticism in the positive sense of the word. I mean giving feedback, with the goal of helping someone else improve or perfect the thing they are trying to do). Maybe the reason criticism is so hard to give is that most of us know how hard it is to receive.

In recent years, I've become quite passionate -- some might say, obsessive -- about a pair of activities that I see as inherently linked, in part because they both depend to a fair extent on receiving and working with another person's critique. I'm talking about yoga and writing.

In yoga, outside critique comes in the form of getting adjustments from your instructor. In writing, it's about asking other writers to make suggestions on how to improve your story. Necessary though it is to one's overall practice of yoga or story-writing, many people in both fields actively fear or dislike the critique.

I know some yogis who flinch whenever the instructor steps over to them. They freeze up; they think, Oh God, what am I not doing right? What mistake has this instructor just seen me make? Or they think: The teacher never adjusts Person X over there. Person X must be so much better at yoga than me.

Similarly, I know some writers who approach the writing workshop** -- the process by which a writer shows her work to others and receives feedback on it -- with unmitigated dread. With the feeling, almost, of seeing your own darling child (the story you've labored over so long!) attacked in front of your eyes.

Who am I kidding? I have been that fearful yogi, that insecure writer. I still am them, on given days.

The critiques in a writing workshop, as with a yoga instructor's adjustments, are meant to be helpful, of course. They're meant to help you see what you cannot see on your own, so that you can go back to the work and re-enter it more mindfully. Why, then, do we often experience such criticism as threatening? Why do we often receive an adjustment, or a suggestion for the story we've written, with a sinking heart? Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it. I'm really no good at this.

Writing and yoga both involve a quality of putting yourself out there -- of being seen. What is workshop feedback, or a yoga instructor's adjustment, but a direct outcome of someone else seeing you -- seeing your work? Perhaps it's not the first thing you think of. Writing is, after all, a mostly solitary activity. To do it, you almost have to be alone, and silent, and deeply focused. In yoga, too, the emphasis is on going inward -- on focusing on how your body feels in each posture, or on how each posture feels in your body.

In other words, in both writing and yoga, you're trying to do this thing that feels simultaneously very challenging and very important. Okay, at least that is how I experience these practices. I've been writing seriously for over 10 years, and doing yoga with an increasing sense of commitment for about half as long. I've already given myself -- a fair bit of myself -- to this work. I've put considerable time and effort toward doing these things with as much skill and understanding as possible, and I feel some ownership in them. At some deep-down, largely unspoken, cellular level I really don't want anyone else to fuck with my work. I am -- yes, sometimes -- afraid of being seen

As I've mentioned previously in this blog, I've been working for the past 2 years on my first full-length novel.***  It's been through 4 full-length drafts and has been critiqued by various fellow writers on several occasions. At times, with this novel, I feel like I'm living in it.

Almost exactly 1 year ago,

when I'd finished my first
full-length draft.

Part I of the novel -- approximately the first third -- is, I think, actually finished or nearly so. Recently I've been feeling good enough about it, and getting enough positive feedback on it, that I began to cherish the hope that I was almost done with the whole thing. Last month, I bashed through what I thought was a final draft of Part II. Yeah, baby! I thought. In another month now, the whole book should be done done done!

Dave had read Part I for me already and had liked it a lot. (Thank you, Dave.) Last week, I gave him my new draft of Part II. He read it while I was out of the house (doing some yoga, no doubt) and when I came back, I said, "So?"

Dave did not exactly say, "Well, I like you," but his response was not far from it.

It's too slow, he said in essence. You lost some of the tension you'd built in Part I. You got caught up in a story line that's not really essential. You need more scenes with these characters who cause the conflict, and less of this background building.

Oogh. Oogh and oogh and oogh.

You know that feeling when someone tells you exactly what you do not want to hear but you know at the same time it's right? I had to lie down on our living room floor for a minute.

"Honey, I'm sorry. Honey, are you okay?" Dave said, hovering over me.

"I'm okay," I said from the carpet. "Don't be sorry. I'm pretty sure you are right."

"Yes, but your voice has gone all flat like it does when you're sad," Dave said.

It had. I knew it had, because it felt like a boulder had crashed onto my chest, which would flatten out anyone's voice, wouldn't it? But I tried to tell him I'd be okay. "I don't want you to think I'm not grateful," I said. "I really am. I need to hear this. It's just that I can see how much work I still have to do, and I was really hoping I didn't."

The good news is that I did get up off the floor, after 10 minutes or so of pure wallowing. I didn't try to write anything more on that day. I had a glass of red wine instead and watched an episode of The Handmaid's Tale. (There's some good writing! Both the novel and the new TV series, in case you haven't read or seen them yet.) Gradually, over the next day or 2, I worked through my disappointment over how much more work I must do. I made some new plans. I outlined an 8-step process by which I will now get the last 2/3 of this novel into better shape. I can do each step individually -- it's the only way -- and each step should take between 1 full day and perhaps a few weeks. One step at a time, the work is not too overwhelming.

This new writing work is about going deeper into my practice, as the yogis say. You go deeper by hitting an obstacle but finding your way through it, simply by coming back to it and trying it again -- ideally with someone to guide you. A yoga teacher, for example. Or a fellow dedicated reader and writer, who will think through the obstacle with you, or even help you come up with a new approach.

The new 8-step plan for revision,

on the wall over my desk.

Going deeper cannot be rushed. In my yoga practice, for example, I cannot get my knee completely behind my shoulder yet, no matter how hard I try. I have confidence that I may be able to do this one day, but it will take months and probably years of returning to my yoga mat almost daily -- asking my body to move into this posture as much as it can, again and again, teaching it to go farther. It happens in increments. It happens only if you try again and again -- if you practice regularly.

Yoga is serious work. Writing is serious work. They are both disciplines of the mind and the body, and dare I say, soul.**** But you cannot, or I cannot, practice them in a vacuum. I need outside eyes, other hands.

* Much of Dave's academic writing is too specialized for me (or 99% of the world's population) to understand very well.

** The workshop format is commonly used at writers' conferences and in Creative Writing MFA programs.

*** I did write 2 novels when I was a kid. I don't think they really count. And I do have a novella -- a shorter book -- coming out this fall, hallelujah and FYI. (But no full-length novels. Not yet.)

**** Yes, writing is a discipline of the body. Just ask anyone who's tried to physically stay at her writing desk every day for a given number of hours.

Common Courtesy: Or, Life on a Small Island

Our street in Durham.

In Durham, England, the recycling-pickup truck comes equipped with an automated warning voice, blasted out at the decibel level of  a stadium football announcer: Stand well clear. Vehicle reversing. [beep, beep] Stand well clear. Vehicle reversing. [beep, beep] Stand well clear .... All right, you get the idea.

The voice is a clipped, posh-sounding, south-of-England male voice: Staahhnd WELL clear. Vehicle re-VUH-sing. Nothing and no one can stop these remonstrations as long as the recycling truck is, well, reversing. (That is to say, backing up.) And very often this truck seems to reverse the entire length of Victoria Terrace, the street below Dave's and my bedroom window, in the wee hours of morning. Once when this guy's stentorian tones woke us up, Dave rolled over in bed and said, "Now, what exactly is it that we should do while he re-VUH-ses?"

Thought I'd prefer they did not wake me up at half-six*, I'm sort of in love with the overly articulate warnings of British culture. Once when Dave and I were in Edinburgh, a fire alarm went off in the office building across from our hotel on St. Andrew Square. (It must have been a drill or a mistake, as we never saw flames.) With this alarm, too, came a loud, posh automated voice: "This is a fire alarm (FI-yuh ah-LAHM). Please vacate the building .... This is a fire alarm. Please vacate the building ...."

St. Andrew Square, in Edinburgh

Hearing this, I said to Dave, "It's just like that damn recycling truck. It not only beeps, it has a voice."

"The British like to make sure you understand why you have to do what you have to do," Dave remarked. "Think of their signage, too."

In America, if someone wanted you to keep your dog off the grass, the sign would just say, NO DOGS or at the very most, NO DOGS ON GRASS. But here the signs literally say, Dog owners are advised please to keep their dogs off of the grass. Dog feces attract rats and other vermin, which we here in the park would like to prevent for health reasons.

Dave and I went on listening to that Edinburgh fire alarm for a while, till he added, "I'm actually sort of surprised it doesn't say"--he affected an upper-crust accent--"'Caution, a fire is burning. Please stay well clear of the flames. The burning flames could cause harm to you, or to others. Please stay well clear of the flames.'"

We had our laugh, as we periodically do here in the UK over such things as signage and alarms. But really, isn't it kind of wonderful? Who in America would even bother to explain things so thoroughly, to try to reason with whomever is being cautioned? How many of us in America, upon seeing a warning sign three sentences long, would stop to even read the whole thing?

There's something about British culture, I think, that calls for a little more slowness, and a little more awareness of others, than we are used to in the US. Rather than flying past signs that are often more image than language -- really just semaphores -- you have to slow down a little in the UK, to read the more detailed signage. And the makers of British signs and alarms go out of their way to be polite, to offer explanations for their requests, in a way that feels, well, more personal. I've come to think there may be a link between being personal and thoughtful of others and having to live close to them.

In America, land of comparatively huge houses and roads and wide-open spaces, one's coworkers and friends and even one's neighbors may actually live miles away. Thus it may be easy to forget that we are not alone, after all, in the spaces we occupy. In England, meanwhile, the presence of others around you is hard to miss. The country of England is physically tiny. It's somewhat smaller than the state of Illinois -- 50,350 square miles, as opposed to Illinois's 57,910. On the other hand, England has a population density of approximately 1,100 people per square mile, while in Illinois the average number of people per square mile is 232. In other words, England has about 5 times as many people per square mile as the state of Illinois. People here live comparatively very close together, even in the English countryside and in small towns like Durham. This physical proximity, in my experience, breeds a kind of politeness -- an awareness of others -- that is not always present in the US, where we may take our big spaces for granted.

As one example, I remember when Dave and I had recently moved to downtown Chicago, to a condo in a converted warehouse. We were at the time teaching at a deeply suburban college, to which we commuted by train. Despite the 90-minute commute to work, Dave and I loved living in Chicago's Loop and raved about it to some of our colleagues at the aforementioned deeply suburban college. "It does sound really great," sighed a fellow professor. "The restaurants, the clubs, the museums! All the street life! But I'm not sure I could live so close to other people."

Downtown Chicago

"What do you mean?" we asked her. "Why not?"

"Well," she said, "how thick are those walls in your condo?"

Dave and I looked at each other. We didn't know. "Pretty thick?" I said. "Thick enough?"

"Yeah, but can you really blast your bass when you want to?" our colleague said. "Can you just turn your music up loud whenever you want to?"

It perhaps goes without saying that this former fellow professor of ours never did make the move downtown. And while I do get the joys of cranking up one's sound system, that feeling of "I should be able to make all the noise I want, whenever I want to" is a feeling that flourishes only in places where our neighbors feel distant from us. (Whether they actually are distant from us -- distant enough that we can jam out at three in the morning -- is another question. I wonder now if the other people who lived on that former colleague's street perhaps heard her bass beat sometimes, even without sharing a wall.)

Durham University students, on Kingsgate Bridge

Because we moved here from the U.S., where that mentality is stronger, Dave and I were leery of all the houses on our street in Durham that were occupied by twenty-year-old students. Durham is a university town, first and foremost; the population literally doubles every October when the new school year begins, so it's hard to find a street in town that doesn't contain student housing. But we did wonder, at first: Are all these university students going to stress us out? Are we going to be up at all hours because of some neighbor kids' wild parties?

The answer is, simply, no and no. (I feel I should touch wood as I write this; who's to say that nice red-headed guy who's always typing in the window across from my office won't turn on a disco ball this very night, invite his 30 best mates over, and fling his window wide? Except that I've watched him and his roommates come and go out for almost 2 years now, and I'm just pretty sure that they won't.) Dave and I do see students on our street every day. This time of year especially -- between final exams at the beginning of June, and graduation at the end of the month -- university students are out at night in full fervor. Most of the time, they seem to be going to fancy-dress balls. The guys wearing tuxes, the girls wearing gowns. This week alone, as I walked around town in the evening, I saw a guy in an actual top hat, two guys in tails, and two others in full-on Scottish kilts. 

Just like this. I kid you not.

The students are out and about. They are partying. I know this, too, because they sometimes throw up in the street. (The city always comes by and cleans up, the day after.) But do I ever hear them? I mean, ever hear them? Again, I hope I'm not jinxing myself as I write this, but I don't. These students are amazingly, wondrously, and -- to my American, noise-jangled mind -- almost miraculously quiet. 

Perhaps the university students never think of it this way, but their relative quiet, even in the midst of their June-long revelry, is a form of respect and politeness to others. I can totally get behind it. And even while the recycling truck's announcements at the crack of dawn and the voice-aided fire alarms may make me groan at times, or just laugh, I think the impulse behind them, too, is a form of respect and politeness. An acknowledgement that we're all sharing this space.

*That's how the British say six-thirty. Isn't it pretty? I think so.

How to Live in Another Country

My sister Linda and me with our uncles

Phil and Rick and our Grandpa and 

Grandma Hostetter -- Nigeria, 1972.

June 8 is an historical day, both in my adopted country and in my country of birth. Here in the UK,  today's general election will determine the party in charge of the government. In the US, former FBI director James Comey will begin his testimony before the US Senate. Though this is essay is not politically themed, it seemed like a good day to reflect on my experiences moving from one country to another.

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I used to think there was some mysterious trick to moving to another country and finding happiness there. I'd seen so many of my relatives do it before me. The most striking example was my grandmother's move to Lagos, Nigeria, when she was 51 and I was 3. I don't remember her leaving, but my parents took my sister Linda and me for a visit a few years later. That time in Lagos and then out into the hills in Nigeria's Middle Belt -- to see my much-adored and then very young uncles at their boarding school -- is one of my first memories. My grandmother loved Africa. People who'd known her before and after said she had blossomed there. She herself said, whenever one of her grandchildren asked her later for the story of her life, that Nigeria was the place where she felt she came into her own.

At about the same time my grandmother was teaching English in Lagos and loving it, my Uncle Doug and Uncle Earl and Aunt Pat were all living in Vietnam, where they worked for Mennonite Central Committee during the peak of the Vietnam War. (My Uncle Doug's story on teaching English in a war zone in South Vietnam, from 1966 to 1969, was recently published in The New York Times.) In these cases, too, I don't remember their departures for a distant country -- in fact, I wasn't yet born -- but again, my first memories of these beloved uncles and aunts were of hearing them discussed by family members who missed them. In my young mind, their names were linked to this other country where they had chosen to live.

My uncle, Doug Hostetter, with some of his students

in South Vietnam, circa 1969

In later years, other aunts and uncles of mine chose to live overseas, too. My Uncle Darrel and Aunt Sherill worked in Swaziland for a decade; my Aunt Mimi and Uncle Wilmer lived even longer than that in Honduras, where my aunt was a doctor to far-flung rural communities, and where the two of them started a ranch that they operate to this day. Still later, cousins of my own generation spent years in Germany and in Russia -- and became so intimately connected to those places, they met their spouses there.

All these family members forged deep, long-lasting links with a country other than the one they were born to. As a child growing up more or less in the midst of my parents' extended families, I grew up, too, with the echoes of Nigeria and Vietnam. At family reunions, I ate my grandmother's African ground nut stew, and learned of my Uncle Doug's fondness for Nước Mắm fish sauce. I was struck when my Aunt Pat and Uncle Earl, meeting a Vietnamese refugee family recently arrived in North Carolina, were able to greet them and converse with them in their own language. Knowing my grandmother -- knowing Aunt Pat and Uncle Earl and Uncle Doug -- was to know something of those other countries, to be aware of Nigeria and Vietnam as almost palpable presences in the lives of my relatives who had lived in those places and had come home permanently changed by them.

Having such positive and early role models for thoughtful expatriate living, I assumed I could do it as well. I wanted to do it -- to make a life for myself overseas, to become part of another country. In the stories I'd heard all my life, it was an adventure -- a worthwhile endeavor -- to live outside the U.S. for a while.

And yet, I struggled in my first attempts. I did live in Spain for a year. I did live in Guatemala, on two separate occasions, for a total of over three years. But I was not radiantly happy. I was not at peace. Almost as soon as I made those moves -- all three times -- I wished I was home again. I could not relax; I could not settle down and just be there, in Spain or in Guatemala. I never felt like I was part of the place. By the time I came back to the States from my last attempt at international living, in 2005, I'd developed a new, mostly secret opinion that my grandmother and aunts, uncles and cousins who'd filled me up with their stories of joyful expatriate living must have been exaggerating. 

But here is the question I hadn't yet thought to ask: What does it take, to be happy in a given place?

The ex-academic in me wants to make two caveats before I go on. Not everyone who moves to another country gets to ask that happiness question. Not everyone who moves to another country does so by choice. In fact, choosing to live in an other country is a luxury. This seems especially important to acknowledge in light of current well-publicized anti-immigrant attitudes in both my home country and in my adopted country. We need look no farther than the U.S. election of Donald Trump, the man who has promised to build a wall on the Mexican border and has tried to enforce a sweeping anti-immigrant travel ban. Here in the UK, last year's Brexit vote resulted in part from a similarly xenophobic mentality. As someone who sees Trump's election and the Brexit vote as real failures of human compassion, I want to recognize that moving to another country in search of adventure or edification or self-improvement -- as I and many of my family members have been able to do -- is a sign of our privilege, our unearned good luck.

It's worth acknowledging, too, that in many parts of the world, living outside one's home country is not so unusual, and thus perhaps not so monumental a choice as it seemed to me as a kid growing up in the U.S. For example, here in Europe I automatically assume any person my age will have lived in at least one other country besides their native one. Almost all of my friends in England have either come here from another country or have spent significant time living abroad. This is partly a feature of European countries being mostly quite small and close together -- often contiguous -- as opposed to the hugeness and physical isolation of the United States. It also has something to do with the UK's having been part of the European Union, which makes it easy for members of EU countries to live, work and travel abroad.* Simply getting to another country is much easier to do, in most parts of Europe, than in the U.S. Thus international living may not seems as challenging, or as exotic, as it does to many of us raised on the other side of the Atlantic.

But why couldn't I be happy living abroad, as the giants of my childhood had seemed to assure me I'd be? Why, in Spain and then twice in Guatemala, was I so restless, so unable to sink down deep roots?

It wasn't until two years ago, when my husband Dave and I moved to England -- where I have been, from the day we touched down, truly happy -- that I was able to answer these questions. And the answer isn't one bit arcane or mysterious. There's no magic trick to it, after all. All I needed to live happily in another country, I've found, is to be happy first in myself.

Or, to put it in a perhaps less annoyingly Zen-like way, my happiness in England is directly connected to my happiness in the work that engages me daily here. England has provided the conditions for my doing the work that I love to do. And, while there are many reasons why I like living in England, I think this one is first and foremost.

Dave and me with the staff of the language school

I directed in Guatemala City, 2003 to 2005.

It wasn't that I'd disliked Spain or Guatemala. It wasn't that I failed to find very good friends in both places. Nor was it that the work I did in any of those former expatriate years was unworthy. But I was one of those people to whom a clear sense of vocation came very late. I spent my 20s and 30s and much of my 40s doing work that did not fulfill me -- that did not draw out my best qualities or, in short, help me to be my best self. During those somewhat misbegotten decades, I was an activist and an academic. I was at least fairly good at both things. But I did not love doing that work. I did not go to bed holding the work I'd just done close to my heart, dreaming of re-entering its flow as soon as I could the next day. Working as an activist, then as an academic, did not call forth my joy, and as such I didn't always have much joy to give to others.

When I finally admitted to myself, somewhere in my late 30s, that my calling -- my heart's desire -- is to be a fiction writer, it came as a huge relief. I could stop forcing myself into the mold of an  English professor, as I'd been trying to do for some years. I could, instead, throw myself into the activity I had loved ever since I could hold a pencil. I could re-sharpen and deepen my skills in creative writing. I could invent stories, new worlds.

Early story-writing, circa 1973.

Or, at least, I could begin to. Dave's and my financial circumstances did not allow me to step completely out of my old teaching role until we moved to England, two years ago, and that is when true daily happiness in my work began.

As it turns out, my journey to another country, this time, was really a journey into my truest, best self. Clearly, we don't all need to move physically -- to change our current locale for a new, international address -- in order to find our best selves. But sometimes, maybe, it helps. I think it was so in my grandmother's case. Moving to Nigeria in her early 50s provided her with a freedom from housework and a scope for her imagination and an engagement with a meaningful, independent career for the first time in her life.

She did not stay in Nigeria; she came home again after six years. But Nigeria, in essence, came home with her. The new, more confident, more leader-like part of herself -- which she'd reached down and found and developed, while she lived abroad -- was, for as long as I knew my grandma, a part of her ongoing joy.


* Brexit, of course, will curb some of this international mobility, among other things.

Time, Death, and the Novel

Some books I have to read over and over, once a year or every few years, because they encapsulate a truth or a kind of beauty I can't get enough of, and with each reading I experience that beautiful truth -- or that true beauty -- in a new, more nuanced way. One such book is Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, though it also contains a chapter so painfully poignant to me, for a long time I couldn't bear to re-read it and had to skip over it in my second and third and fourth readings. It's a chapter about the nature of time, and time's passing:

What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. It is time pounding you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side as your generation's short time is falling away, as fast as rivers drop through the air, and feeling it hit.

Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang onto the ring. Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.*

Ka-wowza, right? As I say, the first time I read it, this passage knocked the breath out of me, and for a long time after, whenever I returned to An American Childhood, I'd carefully avoid that particular chapter. It cut too close to the bone. It reminded me too much of how I had felt in mid September 2007, the week after my mother had been pulled from a car that looked like a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, and for a few days after we had not known whether or not she would survive. The day of the accident, I flew home from Chicago to North Carolina, and sometime that weekend I left the hospital to walk around my parents' now-empty house, looking at all the framed photos. Here was my mother holding my cousin's new baby (oh, how my mother loves babies!). Here she was on the beach with one of my twin sisters on either side of her. There she was in her black-and-white wedding portrait with Dad; there she was, too, thirty-five years later, in a family photo from my brother's wedding.

Technically, this is not one of the photos of my mom

that are visible in my parents house. But I love it.

Here she is with my dad, circa 1962.

That night, those photos no longer looked like milestones along a path that would go on unfolding endlessly, as long as I wanted it to. The photos looked, suddenly, more like relics.

I remember thinking, Is this it? Is it over already? Is this all the time with my mother that we're every going to get?

Though my mother did live -- though she is, thank God, still holding babies and attending weddings and going to her beloved beach -- that week in 2007 when none of us knew whether she would live was the first time I felt the utter finiteness of human life. Why had I thought that my mother's life -- or anyone's -- would go on forever and ever? Against all the hard evidence the world offers us to the contrary, how had I assumed that our time together was boundless?

Time is precious, as one cliché goes. Time is a commodity, goes another. But often in our western culture, such sayings are used as a reason to rush on the next task or event, to move forward, to get on with things.Westward ho! Climb ev'ry mountain! The greener pastures are yet to come.

The more I think about this mentality, the stranger it seems. If this minute right now while I'm writing this -- if the minute right now while you're reading this -- is unrepeatable, is unique: if in fact there'll never be another minute again quite like this one, and we'll never get this minute back, why wish it away? Why burn through it? Rather than valuing the space I'm in here and now, why focus so often on what happens next?

With one part of my now fifty-year-old brain, I do appreciate all this hard-won knowledge about transience and mortality and the beauty of the present moment. I can stomach such knowledge better now, in the middle of middle age, than I could in my thirties, when I first read An American Childhood and that chapter on time broke my heart.

Even so, I'm as guilty as the next person of romanticizing the future. I participate regularly, often unwittingly, in the greener-pastures-are-over-there mentality that American culture seems to propagate. What can I do or achieve, I often wonder, that will make me feel better in the near future? Should I buy a new dress, a new yoga mat? Get a new job, or move to a brand-new locale?

It seems to be part of my nature to ardently look forward to the next thing, the next phase of life -- to think that everything will somehow be better, around the next bend in the road. I did it in high school, wanting the weekend to come. I've done it often since the 2016 U.S. elections. (When, oh when, will it finally be 2020?)

I'm not saying we don't sometimes actually need to make changes -- need them for important physical or emotional or even spiritual reasons. (The need for a change in U.S. leadership is an obvious example. And my last yoga mat, I'm here to tell you, really was a piece of crap.)**

But earlier this week I came face to face with my own impulse to change things as soon as they get slightly unpleasant or difficult -- to submit to the romance of What else? or what next? And that confrontation has made me want to think more deliberately about time and how I live within time.

Earlier this week, I found myself growing restless -- mentally restless. I kept thinking, Am I doing what I should be with my life? Maybe I should start teaching English again. Should I volunteer as a tour guide at Durham Cathedral? Should I become a yoga instructor?

I even felt restless with Durham and England, for the first time since Dave and I made the move. It's been twenty-two months that we've lived here now, so I wondered: Is this super-delayed culture shock?

Finally, two nights ago, I sat down with Dave and told him how I was feeling. I said, "I don't mean that I necessarily will make any one of these changes. But I'm feeling these sudden, kind of strong urges, and I want to tell you about them."

I told him. He listened. Then he said, "Don't you think this is mainly about your novel?"

As some of you know, I've been writing a novel. I've been working on it pretty hard for the past two years. Most of the time I find this work absorbing, even all-consuming, in a deeply enjoyable way. Most of the time, writing the novel has felt to me as violin playing feels to the character in Alice Munro's wonderful story, "My Mother's Dream": "It is a problem that she has to work out strictly and daringly, and that she has taken on as her responsibility in life." For the past two years, as I've sat down at my writing desk day after day, "the problem is still there in its grandeur," as Munro writes.***

Dave Janzen,

who is so marvelously wise

This summer, however, I am closing in on the end of this work. By July or August, my novel will most likely be out of my hands, on its way out into the world.

But what if it never gets very far? What if this novel is in fact not very good? What if, as with my last yoga mat, I'm just thinking or hoping that it will be awesome, but it's really a piece of crap?

I don't normally think this way. (If I did, I probably could not keep writing.) But seeing the finish line approaching this summer has stirred up these fairly rare anxieties. I can think whatever I want to about my work so long as I keep it close to my chest -- so long as I never declare the novel finished and send it out to an agent. But once I do, there comes the real, public test.

My desire to move or to change something, Dave suggested last night, came from such recent anxieties. "You're in a more uncomfortable space with your work now," he said, "and so your mind has started casting around for basically anything else you can do."

Ka-wowza again, I have to say. Dave was right. I knew it as soon as he said it.

"The real challenge," Dave added, "is to stay in this less-than-comfortable space. Stay with the work, stay in the moment. Don't try to jump out of it."

The challenge, in other words, is to be where I am, to do what needs doing in the given day without being too distracted by what comes before this or after. It reminded me of one of the major precepts of yoga -- or the one, at least, which has been coming through to me more clearly and resonantly lately.

Sometimes when we're holding a difficult posture in class, the yoga teacher will say, "Your body will want to move out of this posture. Your brain will come up with all sorts of tricks to get you to move, to change your position. But see if you can breathe through it. Can you breathe into the moment? Can you achieve stillness in any way?"

My writing desk

Stillness in yogic practice isn't really about lack of physical movement, or it's not mainly about that. It's a mental stillness -- an absolute okay-ness with where you are, even if there are unpleasant elements. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't make a change when our context  has become dangerous or damaging. As my yoga teachers also say, in encouraging us to stick with a hard posture, "If you feel sharp shooting pains, then you should move -- you should get out of the posture."

On the other hand, they usually, gently add, if all you're feeling is just some discomfort, try to stay with it. Keep breathing. See what you can learn from this space, from this moment, from being right here, right now.

I'm gonna stay in this saddle, then, despite some nervousness and a few bruises. To put it another way, I'll keep standing under this waterfall, trying to breathe and to love it.

*     From pages 50 to 51 in the 1987 Harper and Row edition. I have compressed from the original.
**   Check out the  helpful review site, The Best Yoga Mat, to make sure you really like your next mat.
*** From pages 318 to 319 in 1998 Vintage International edition. I have compressed from the original.