I run through the park where my husband and I held our wedding reception in 1999. There is the big rock that looks like a baked potato, the one we sat on for one of my favorite wedding day photos. There is the grassy lawn where we had a four-string quartet, and I waltzed with my grandfather.
Brilliant pink leaves are floating like cotton candy down from the trees. Puppies zoom around the dog park, and a snapping turtle is stuck between the fence and the porta-potty. A man digs it out with his walking stick. I ran past three deer, half a dozen ducks, rabbits. It is 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
No one is chasing me. No one throws stones at me. No one pinches my rear. Probably, no one even looks at it. No one calls me a prostitute or wonders about my body parts, worried they might fall off or out or be rendered ineffective if I continue running.
I am not sweating, not even a little bit. No drips, no streams, no splatters, no sloppy footprints through my shoes, no sweaty foam. There is no salt in my eyes and no dirt in my teeth and no camels to laugh at or wild dogs to be afraid of.
I think about Djibouti. And I wonder. Did I really do that? Did I really live there? Did all that really happen? Is this really one planet, the same shared earth?
Later that same week, I am in my yard raking and raking and raking. We have a lot of trees. Tomorrow, I will do this again. Rake and rake and rake. My neighbor is out, too, raking. I wave. He waves back. We rake our own yard with our own rakes on our own.
Later, he mows his lawn. I mow my lawn. In a few months, he will shovel his driveway. I will shovel my driveway. We will wave.
I don’t run into people I know at the grocery store every day. The cashiers never ask after my children by name. They never tell me they are praying for my family.
I don’t buy drinking water from the same man every Monday for twenty years, so I don’t ask about the children of anyone having anything to do with my drinking water. I don’t go to the phone company in person to pay my bills or resolve a problem and so I don’t know what the people working there even look like, let alone how their grandmother is doing after her surgery.
I drive fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes to see a friend, and that feels close. I certainly would never just drop over, not without planning several months in advance.
I think about Djibouti. And I wonder. Do I really do this? Do I really live here? Is this really happening? Is this really one planet, the same shared earth?
Djibouti feels like a long time ago and like it is still current. Minnesota feels like a radically strange world and like it is utterly normal.
Neither is better or worse, there is just the way it was and the way it is. There were and there are beautiful things and challenging things on both sides of this shared planet.
Sometimes I feel dizzy trying to hold it all, and I wonder if any of it was, or is, real. And then, my mom sends me a box of stuff.
Because now I do live in Minnesota and I did buy a house and it does have a basement and we don’t have the American twenty-five-plus years of accumulating stuff, so we have multiple empty shelves. My mom was thrilled to pass off my old things. A lot of it is junk.
One box was delivered just last week. It is a box of gold. Embarrassing, precious gold. The box contained three massive binders and a stack of loose-leaf papers: every email I sent from the day we landed in Kenya in February, 2003 until 2008.
Kenya, Somaliland, Ethiopia, back to Kenya, on to Djibouti. The email pretending canned green peas count as vegetables (barf). The email about neighbors trying to teach me how to shake my butt when I danced (never managed). The one about when my water broke and then the long wait for labor to begin and then the sudden, two quick pushes, and voila, a baby!
The thief. Another thief. Language successes. Language disasters. The first time friends invited us into their home. Learning to cook. Learning to differentiate goat meat from lamb from cow from camel as they all hang in slabs from metal hooks. Starting to run. Keeping on running. Culture lessons. My husband’s job at the university,
Every blog post I published on my old blogspot website that my sister built for me in 2007. All my published pieces for Running Times when I was a regular columnist for them, my first paid writing gig. My mom had printed out each one and saved it in a binder.
I wrote a lot.
I remember I had to write emails into a word doc, and my husband Tom would take it to the university to copy, paste, and send. Eventually we got dial-up, and it was so slow I would write everything into a word doc, log on, copy and paste, hit “send,” and go make dinner while waiting to see if the emails sent. It was faster to upload a photo to a blog, and so I started doing that, making those early entries exactly what bloggers joked about — writing for my mom.
I don’t have these emails or blog posts saved anywhere else. The story of my first market visit and the kids falling into cacti in Somaliland. My thrill at completing a conversation in Somali for the first time. The day Annalena was murdered and everything changed.
Emails sent from our safe house during security lockdown. Then Ethiopia, then Nairobi, then where would we go? The email announcing we were moving to a place called Djibouti.
Lists of requests for items to be packed and brought when visitors came. My mom’s pencil markings on what she was sending and how it was getting packaged to save weight.
What was it like to get those emails? To hear about my daughter falling from the roof and we were in Somaliland, so far away. To hear reports about the kids growing up without being able to hold them or see them or hear them? To wonder if we were going to be okay, safe, if we could thrive?
I have not read through everything yet. I’ve hardly read anything. I’m not sure I’m ready to relive that part of me. Who was I? How silly and naive and brave and curious was I? Am I still?
What I do know is that I’m so glad my mom saved these memories. Just looking at them, flipping through the photos, watching words pop off the page, I know.
I did live that. I did live there. Those things really happened. That really was my beautiful, challenging community. And so is this one, this new one in Minnesota. Not entirely new, as it is built on my first twenty-three years of life here.
And still, new, as this new life in Minnesota is one I am weaving on a loom built in Djibouti. Or think of it as a quilt containing all the squares from before while I add fresh squares, and it becomes a melange, an isku dhex karis.
*Isku dhex karis is a traditional Somali stew whose name basically means “cook it all together.”
