Recreating
I’m enjoying a Thai rice and tofu salad by myself. I think Matt would probably like it, but he is traveling so I see this as an opportunity to experiment with recipes from The Happy Pear, a pint-sized vegan restaurant in Greystones, Co Wicklow where I would often stop with my “hill walking” friends. “A lifetime ago,” we like to say. Meanwhile, Spotify’s Natalie Merchant playlist streams through the speaker. From recalling my “discovery” of 10,000 Maniacs in middle school to easing into the softer melodies of her solo career, my mind’s eye looks through a make-believe pinhole and sees a different me. But still the same…you know what I mean. It’s hard to hold hands with a 10- or 20- (or, yikes, 30-)-years-earlier version of oneself, much less give her a high five. But I’ll always try!
I’m eating this meal in the same city where our two children were born. Their first home was a house maybe 3 miles away…at some point, the new owner put a Little Free Library out front (!), and there it — and the actual house, which is now dwarfed by larger homes — stands. It’s the same house, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same paint job too. (We painted it the cheeriest apple green during a reno, but were told we needed to repaint it off-white in order to sell…) Same but different.
My son, my youngest, is about to graduate from high school and I guess I’m a little emotional about that as well as pensive about all the geographic zigs and zags that our family has taken. Would he — would I, would we — be the same if we stayed in one place? (Doesn’t really matter…I couldn’t have asked for a better son.)
I love this thought from Real Estate by Deborah Levy (so good!): “Each new journey is a mourning for what has been left behind. The wanderer sometimes tries to recreate what has been left behind, in a new place.” Childhood, a green house, a cool little restaurant — all left behind. I think we’ll always have a bit of “recreate” as a goal when we’re in a new stage or phase. Some might say that’s too fixated on the past, but I think that leaning into it is the very thing that propels us forward, securely, into new territory.
originally published on instagram