Here, Writing About There
Plus, an announcement! My new book, Pass-Through Place, is coming soon
In early July, I sat on the edge of a manmade beach in Germany, talking with a friend. Our family had gone to the lake for the day—and by lake, I really mean more of a large watering hole. But it was a top-notch watering hole, with inflatables for the kids and plenty of beach chairs, plus food stands serving bratwurst, pommes, and Fanta.
Above us, planes flew low to the ground in a steady line, preparing to descend into the nearby Frankfurt airport from all over the world. Because the lake sits directly on the path to the airport, we occasionally had to stop talking (or start shouting) as the roaring engines approached.
I love almost nothing more than a quiet, honest conversation. Although the planes made that challenging, for a few moments between the noise and swimming, my friend and I discussed our family’s upcoming summer visit to Kansas. Our conversation easily drifted into the expat tensions we both feel. After several years of living abroad, I feel at home in this new setting, in many ways. Our family has found people to do life alongside, we deeply love the opportunities to travel and explore, and we’re grateful for the chance to meet people from all over the world.
Yet, we always feel that pull, too—the distance from family and friends in the states.
Here is home, there is home.
Here are friends, there are friends.
“It’s like you always leave one home to go to another home, and you leave that home to go back home,” my friend said.
I sighed and nodded my agreement. My kids splashed in the lake ahead of me as the roar of an engine grew closer, the belly of another airplane crossing just overhead.
Two days later, our family boarded a plane for the states. Although we have been flying and traveling regularly in this season, my relationship with flying is complicated. After a rough flight home last summer, I have been having a harder time getting myself on board.
But at the end of the long travel day, I kept telling myself, I would get to see my Grandma Jessie. Grandma Jessie is my last living grandmother, currently residing in an assisted living center in my Kansas hometown. She has dementia, and she occasionally struggles to remember why we are in Germany, and for how long. But she is full of warmth and delight, often cracking jokes and carrying on conversations like an old friend, even if some lines are repeated.
I see Grandma Jessie too rarely these days, since the logistics of Facetime and international phone calls to her room are not always simple. So, during the moments of the long flight when I struggled to be on the plane—when we experienced turbulence or when I was poking at plastic-wrapped microwave pasta— I pictured Grandma Jessie’s face.
On the other side of the ocean, I would hug my grandma.
Back in central Kansas, after a full twenty-four hours of traveling, I slept. Hard. For two weeks, I slept better than I had in a full year. Can I blame my increasingly poor sleep on age, hormones, the mattress we need to replace, or something beyond me? Did my body just know that I was home, back over the same square of ground I slept above for years? Whatever the case, I was relieved to finally drift off into nighttime and wake up with a rested brain.
It reminded me of another season in which I was also not sleeping, when I took many trips home to central Kansas from our house at the time in downtown Kansas City. The trip was much shorter then, with no international flights involved. But my need for those drives was as great as ever, the post-pandemic days leaving me isolated from others and disconnected from myself. Those trips back to central Kansas felt like a recurring pilgrimage, a chance to reconnect with the open skies of my childhood and hug my grandmothers, who were both still living at the time.
Now, in a healthier season and much farther away, I am still returning to Kansas. Still finding respite there.
Throughout the course of our summer visit, I did hug Grandma Jessie, several times. On my final trip to the assisted living center, she wasn’t in her room, so I wandered the halls, searching. I finally found her in a back room, singing hymns alongside other residents. I waited in the hallway while the music finished.
After she pushed out of her chair and onto her walker, she turned toward where I was sitting. Her eyes brightened.
“Are you here for me?” Grandma Jessie asked.
She may not always remember the details of why I am coming and going, but she knows I am hers. When I told her I was there because I was leaving again, a fact which maybe neither of us fully understands, we both cried.
Back in Germany, I deal with ferocious jet lag by ordering a croissant from my favorite café. I bite past its crisp outer crust, feeling the gentle separation between each layer and the softness those air pockets create. I hug my friends here, the ones who know how to navigate our narrow German driveway or how the afternoon light falls across my couch at 1630 Central European Time. I return to the rhythms of kids and carpooling, walk to our local grocery store nestled in the shadow of a small medieval castle tower. I take walks on the local trails through area forests and exhale with the cooler temperatures a northern climate brings.
Then, back in my German attic at my writing desk, I work hard toward finishing a book about Kansas—a project dedicated to my beloved grandmothers, my late Nana and my Grandma Jessie.
I suppose my long absences from Substack could make it seem that I have been writing very little—but the truth is that I struggle to show up online because I have been writing and living so deeply.
In fact, this has been the most surprising year in my writing life. Earlier this year, my memoir about Kansas found a publishing home and will soon be making its way onto bookstore shelves and nightstands across the world. I can’t wait to tell you more about it! But for now, I’ll say that it’s a book about growing up under the wide possibilities of a Kansas sky and learning to see what others might overlook. It’s about paying attention on long stretches of open road, about passing through wheat fields, historic ice storms, and tornado-ravaged small towns. It’s about making return visits to Kansas during those days when I needed healing, and how the geography of longing and loss has carved into me more deeply than the Flint Hills.
I wrote it for my grandmothers, but also for my parents, for my expat children, for the friend sitting next to me on the European beach. I wrote it for readers who find themselves traveling through the mundane and the marvelous, navigating both the beauty and tensions of home. I wrote it for all of us who are passing through, gathering up the stories we have been given.
I have felt every bit of the paradox that this book about Kansas has somehow come to life while I am living an ocean away, in what feels like an entirely different reality and era of living. Yet these themes of home keep finding me, through changing definitions and shifting seasons.
I am here, writing about there.
I am there, writing about here.
I am fully present here, and I am also holding home closely.
I can’t wait to share more with you soon.
As I prepare to share my stories, I’d also love to hear yours …
Where is home for you?
How do tensions around home meet you right now?
Congratulations, Jenna. I can't wait to hold this one in my hands.
I cannot wait to hear more! Miss you so, dear friend! Please have an extra croissant for me 💛