I've taken the long way home

When I was a little girl in New England, our mothers would take my friend and me down to the riverside to swim and picnic. Across the road from the embankment that led to the river was a big open field. Once a year, in late summer, the back of the field would be filled with a small string of trucks and trailers, all-tumbledown and rangy looking, some even looked like hand-made shacks being pulled by fat 1950’s cars. At night you could see the campfires burning, hear music and echoes of laughter. When I asked my Mom who they were, she said “Gypsies”. They weren’t like Olde Worlde Gypsies, like the gypsy in my genealogy that ran off with a Frenchman’s noble daughter. These weren’t the wild-hearted gypsies in my mother’s bloodline that my father blamed for all he feared in me. And they weren’t the ones I always suspected deep in my heart had left me on my parents’ doorstep with a note to raise me well and a bag of jewels wrapped in a handkerchief to see me through.

No, these were farming gypsies, who would appear around harvest to pick crops. They lived in a sympathetic farmer’s field every year. They were rumored to be of some European origin, but no one we knew was really sure where they had come from. They came and went like a whirl of smoke, never staying long enough for anyone to get to know them before they were gone. For weeks after they left, people blamed missing objects on “the gypsies” as though even in absentia they could lift watches from bureaus in houses they had never entered. Still, every year for many years they came and went as regular as the seasons.

I envied them, imagining a wandering life that took root in me over the years. In fairy tales, parents were supposed to keep their children away from the gypsies, for fear they would be beguiled away, lured by the romance of caravans and violins, kerchiefs and dances in the firelight, the shimmer of silver and the reflection in the fortune-teller’s glass.

And so, because the gypsy in my blood heard the siren call of the farming gypsies, I became a wanderer, living in Nebraska, rural Massachusetts, the city or mountains of Colorado, Appalachia, and several industrial towns in Ohio. The hills of Vermont, the heart of New York City, a house on banks of the Thames, a small town in New Jersey all were home-ish. Not homes, but home-ish. Nothing gave me more joy than to travel, to be on the move. I have twice taken 3 month driving road trips alone, with no destination pre-planned. I have wandered not because I was looking for happiness, but because wandering made me happy. I took delight in discovery, in new horizon lines. The mystery of other languages was hypnotic. I wanted to drink in as much as I could see and hear and touch. I had a job that required abundant international travel. I filled a passport with entry stamps and needed new pages.

But I always touched base for a feeling of home with my parents, specifically my mother, in Massachusetts. It was there that I reported back the results of my wanderings, brought the souvenirs, told the stories. I tumbled the tales of my journeying like shiny pebbles into her lap and we gazed at them together, marveling at the smoothness of one, the shininess of another. Then I would be gone again, gathering more sights and sounds and experiences to bring home again. For that was always home, the link to my childhood. Even in the thirteen years of my marriage when I said “home” in the deepest way, I always meant New England. The gypsies had stolen my heart, but not before New England had claimed me as her own.