Home is Where you Hang your Heart

Last night we had pancakes for supper. As I was quadrupling for our family of five -- the recipe that, only yesterday, it seems, I only had to double-- I paused to appreciate the simple sweetness of the four perfectly formed hearts of baking powder on the top of the dry ingredients.

Just before we moved across the globe three years ago, my mother-in-law slipped a cute set of heart shaped measuring spoons into our menagerie of kitchen gadgets, poignantly reminding us that she would be thinking of us across the globe, with love, and that we, even during mundane, daily tasks like cooking, would know we were carried in her heart. There is not a time that we measure out an ingredient with those heart-shaped spoons that we don’t remember.

There are special people we want to hold in our hearts too. People, like our parents and grandparents and other friends and family that we want our children to know and recognize even though we now spend only a few weeks out of every year on the same continent with them. We keep in contact with phone calls, and e-mail and our blog. We look at pictures. We hang photos on the wall. And, we hold them in our hearts.

There is also so much about moving to China and our time here I don’t want to forget. So, last fall, when I began depositing Bea at her kindie three mornings a week I finally started a journal of our three years in Asia. I have over 140 double spaced pages on the computer to date. It’s a retelling of our arrival in China. It describes our home and daily life. It’s a record for the kids to someday read. It’s a record, perhaps for us to someday share. I did really well journaling in the fall, but as I’ve become increasingly involved with other things, I have not kept up.

And then I saw those hearts in the pancakes. They reminded me of another heart and another story I need to write-- a story that somehow weaves itself into our lives today.

When my parents moved to Canada I was a sophomore in college. To this day, I don’t know if I remember a more lonely feeling than when I watched that 27-foot moving truck pull out of the driveway in Illinois of the home we would no longer live in. They were moving 1600 miles away.

A thoughtful friend gave me a small pewter heart she had had engraved for me that read, “Home is where you hang your heart.” I slipped that heart into my pocket and carried to back to my dorm room where it hung until the end of the semester. I hung it in the bedroom of my parent’s new home in Canada that summer. Then in the fall, when I headed back to college in Illinois, I hung it in the bedroom I shared with my friend. I took it with me again in the spring, when I traveled to Minnesota to complete my internship. I had the distinct pleasure those weeks to live with my grandmother and I laid the heart on the dresser we shared.

That spring ramped up to a very busy summer. I would complete my internship, go to my parents for a few weeks, and then return to Illinois for my wedding. When it was time to move on, I failed to pack my pewter heart, but in the great excitement of all that was to come, I did not even notice. 

I didn’t think of that heart again until several summers later when my husband and I were visiting my grandmother and saw it hanging on the huge felt map she has above her bed. That pewter heart with the light pink ribbon was carefully hung on a straight pin. The straight pin was plunged deep into the soft red felt. The heart was hanging in Asia. My grandma spent 40 years in Pakistan. That’s where she called home.

Fast-forward a more than a decade. My gently aging grandma still lives in Minnesota. Her body is slowly tiring, though her mind remains sharp. Her heart still hangs in Asia. Ironically, our family now lives in Asia. You might say it is where we now hang our hearts. And in our collective hearts, we hold loved ones from across the globe.

Yesterday Bea stood on the staircase peering down, with a funny look, at the grouping of black and white photos in our front hall. One photo is of our modern Chinese apartment building. Another is of our home in Lisbon. The third is of our three girlies, three years ago, standing at O’hare in front of a mountain of luggage destined for our new home.

“Is Eliza my age?” she asks. I tell her yes, and that little Millie is roughly the age Eliza is now. And sweet little Bea is just a baby. She smiles because she loves babies, though she is very proud is no longer is one.

“Are those both our houses?” she asks inquisitively. She has no memory of living in our old brick bungalow in the mid-West, though she readily identifies with the photo of our Chinese flat. Next month she will have celebrated four birthdays here.

“Yes. They are both our houses, but we live in this house now.” I try to explain. The picture of our American home is a bit unflattering. The trees are February naked. The yard is blah. There is a huge moving truck parked in the long drive under the old maple trees, ready to pack us up for China. I had taken the picture to commemorate the move, but then thought it could really commemorate both the move and the house. It could represent transition. I framed those three photos to help the girls remember where we came from and establish where we are now.

But, I realized, as I stood gazing introspectively at my clever pre-schooler, where we hang our hearts, and who we hold in them is of much greater value than the address we live at. Home is where we hang our hearts. For now, that home is Asia. And, know, dear reader, from that home we are holding you gently in our hearts.