Fog Myths

There is a dense fog around our house, this being the third day of it.  The air keeps out much of the sun, but I grew up here, and I love it.  Foggy days bring a romance and a mystery to the place you live.  The fog forces one to look at what is close at hand, and forget that off in the distance is a beautiful mountain, a catholic church, a football field or a city skyline.  Fog makes you drive slow, and consider staying home altogether; two very good ideas.

This week found a turning point for me.  I had not recognized how difficult coming back to Seattle has been on my psyche.  Seattle feels like a place of no place, a city of mercenary minds prepared to mobilize their families to new cities whenever the opportunity comes.  In Albania the opposite is true.  The country is only larger than the state of Hawaii by some 200 square miles.  The people are, for the most part held there due to strict immigration policies from their neighbors due to the fact that they don’t belong to the EU.  The resulting community is quite remarkable.  Family members remain in the cities of their birth often times with grandmothers living in the same homes as their grandchildren.  Land stays in the family even if it has been abandoned for decades, the people are tied to it, it is their birthright, their heritage, and a point of prestige.  In one of the cities I visited, Peshkopi, on a family plot of land was an old house with a caved in roof.  That was the oldest son’s house, and when he returned from his work in Tirana, he would repair it and make it his dwelling.  In Albania the expectation is that you will stay, in Seattle the expectation is that you will go.

My anchors here have always been my parents, my grandmother, my aunt and uncle and their family, and for ten years now All Saints Church.  There is an unsettled feeling here, like we are all building on foundations made hastily, temporarily, of inexpensive materials.  I want to be part of a life monumental; to participate in the creation of the lasting, enduring, timeless works of humankind.  I am frustrated when I make attempts to do this on my own, which is one of the reasons I need community around me.  It is both a reason to plant, and a reason to uproot; the myth of fertile foreign soils is a relentless siren in the fog.