Post Party Depression

In the waining hours of my eve, I find my mind drifting into reflection.  Or perhaps these are the “waxing” hours.  Either be the case, I can’t help but feel a strange melange of sadness, confusion and elation.  A chapter feels as though it is coming to an end and with it a bit more of my former identity.  On this day we hosted a “thanksgiving” dinner for those that really defy proper description.  My hosting got the better of me and a sentiment that I wanted to convey got lost.  As the sands slipped through our hour glass, I found myself clinging to our last few guests.  I can honestly say, I care little for the pleasantries of Thanksgiving.  The moment when the conversation turns to the sentimental and we are each in turn expected to recite that which we are thankful for gives me heartburn.  “Thank you for my friends, thank you for my family, thank you for this meal . . . etc, etc, etc.  This year, however, I think perhaps the word “thankful” means more than it ever has in the Butler household.  This year we find ourselves truly blessed with what I believe to be our “family of friends”.  My intent was to propose a toast to those that gathered with us on this day, for it has been their loyalty to us over the past year that has made our lives in this new home possible.  They have been there in good times and bad.  They have been our shoulder to cry on and an extended hand to help pick us back up whenever we have fallen.  They did so, not because they felt a duty born of blood kinship, but because they wanted to.   For this I owe a debt I can never repay.  And so I spent the afternoon memorizing their faces and praying the clock would stop for just a moment or two so that we could take stock of where we are, where we have been and where we are going.  As we grow older, the latter of these seems less fixed than in our youth.  Expectations change and living with uncertainty carries with it less of a burden.  Instead, a clarity is given to the past and sense is made of the present.  As the moments of our celebration slipped away and our home once more grew empty and still, I was reminded of all those thoughts and even speculations that had heretofore consumed my soul.  Soon we will return to the land from which we came and in doing so I wonder how they will find me.  Will they recognize the man standing before them?  Will I recognize them?  For the first time in this adventure that we know as our new life, I find myself torn between two “homes”.  In returning to a place once called “home” a dear  friend of ours who is a brilliant author in his own right and a fellow ex-patriot once wrote, “Everything feels familiar, like putting on an old shoe, formed to one’s foot from the years of service, instant comfort and a receptacle for my dry socks”.  There have been many restless nights over the past year when I have longed for that feeling.  And soon it will come to pass.  Yet tonight I find myself restless for a different reason.  The hardest fought battle for those that do as we have done is to find that sense of belonging that we leave behind when we board the plane for parts unknown.  It wasn’t until this day, day 278 (give or take) that I realized this battle had been won.

As I looked across the table at each of our guests, a feeling of insignificance washed over me like a bucket of cold water.  Had we never made landfall on that grey February day, now months removed, they would have never been the wiser.  Their lives would have gone on as they had before and their extraordinary character would have remained untarnished by our needfulness.  We, on the other hand, would have lost as much as we now gain for having known them.  It is for this that I give “thanks” this year.  And so I know, many months from now, when and if I again return to my home on the western side of the Atlantic I will be just as sad to say goodbye to my family of friends as I was to say farewell to the friends in my family back when this journey first began.  This changes not the ache that remains from the loss we have already endured, but is a reminder that your home is not your house.  Within your house you hang your hat, within your home you hang your heart.  It is my great fortune that my ‘home” stretches an ocean wide without bias for cultural heritage or national origin . . . and that is worth being thankful for.  R.