Readers, I believe we are each other’s home.
I (Amy) have been thinking about how we feel at home in the world. This has been knocking on my brain as I reckon with the recent loss of my cousin.
Mark was 10 years older than me and the first of our generation to leave this life. My mother, uncle and aunt are in their 80s and 90s and our extended Irish Catholic family buckled at his relatively early death.
My cousins Mark and Danny babysat us and broke things. We adored them, my sisters and I and then my brother when he came along. Mark was my younger sister’s godfather, even though he was just a teenager when she was born. He took her horseback riding and voted for her long before she had the confidence to vote for herself. This kind of support, multiply his by the dozen cousins I have, is what drew me back to Troy after a self-imposed exile to Seattle in the 90s.
I've been so lucky to have the last 25 years here. Without trying, I could run into my cousins on the bike trail, and we saw each other on purpose at holiday parties and graduations and weddings and funerals.
Reeling in this loss I was able to identify the value of these relationships. My family makes me feel at home in the world. This is kinship. I had loads of friends in Seattle, and had we stayed there, our bloodless kin would have strengthened. Beautifully, this ragtag clan of arty rebels are still our friends.
But to be seen and known all your life is something else. Mark had my number and could size me up like no one else. He was wicked smart, emotionally and intellectually. The last few years, he’s mentored my son Felix, helping him think through engineering school and work. What a luxury to have these connections.
I'm relishing the cousins I still have, and so glad that one of them just bought a home right here in Troy, making it simple for us to have lunch on the regular.
I'm aware that this kind of family is a rarity. My greatest inheritance is that my parents’ generation liked their siblings and stayed in steady touch, weaving us together in childhood and beyond.
I’m also aware that this ease is not available to everyone, on many levels. Families can be harsh and unaccepting. And as white, middle-class people, we’ve had the privileges of health, education and good housing to cushion us. Yet our ancestors were immigrants here, too, and made it through the eye of the needle. My mom’s grandmother, her Babcha, almost did not get through Ellis Island– I will tell you this story another day.
Today I want to say that I'm heartbroken that so many people are being deprived of the most minimum hospitality and kinship under the new American regime. The antigovernment outlaws are terrifying immigrants and keeping them from sending their children to school. Indigenous people are getting scooped up in the melee. I never imagined America could be so unwelcoming to its citizens, and future citizens.
I’m proud of friends working to support immigrants here, training to help people in Know Your Rights immigrant defense campaigns, and getting food to folks who are afraid to leave the house.
—Amy
From Ellie:
As a first-generation immigrant, the idea of home and family tugs at my heart. I am always missing the smells, the people, the weather. And I am often reminded.
“Where are you from?” is a question I’ve been answering for more than three decades, even as a citizen. And yet, sometimes I still hesitate, as if unsure how to respond. Because the follow-up is often: “But where are you really from?
We are always in motion—constantly moving, constantly being hosted—whether in the ways we live, work, travel, or share meals. I’ve lived in many places, crossed countless borders, and felt the generosity of both strangers and the land itself. We have all been guests, in ways both grand and intimate: at dinner tables, on crowded buses, in large stadiums.
In my family, every member was born in a different country. Home, for us, is wherever I can break bread or eat cake with my husband and our two children. I often tell my friends, church, and chosen family that I feel more like a bird building nests wherever I go, rather than a tree pushing roots into the earth.
There are many ways we find shelter, both in the land and in each other. There are many ways we can host, starting with making space for ideas to come in.
40 Lines Meditation on "host"
By Ellie Markovitch.
Host!
This is an open invitation
To host ideas
With jars from our kitchens
Greens and flowers from our paths
We come with our microbes
And all that inhabit our livings
And our past
We will feed from all of it.
Are we forgetting how?
To host each other
Like the three sisters: corn, beans and squash.
Naturally,
Microbiome communities
Transforming
Giving and receiving
Unannounced and unexpected
Also having tea and pie
Embroidering life with patient hands.
Host the unseen
In all spaces
Host a family
Host a country
Human host
Hospice for the traveler
And for the dying
We are the hosts and the guests
Like nesting dolls
Settled inside one another.
Or is the challenge in why?
In the offer
In the wanting
To host our rest
To experience compassion
Welcome fear and pain
Joy and excitement
Come in
Serenade me a story
Soup is on
The bread is warm
Keep the door open
I have carried one of my mom’s ideas. Most Fridays she would turn the oven on and make a blender cake and a few other bakes for the weekend. These days she doesn’t bake as much, but she always has something to share with relatives, neighbors, maintenance or anyone who rings the bell. If they don’t want to come in, she also keeps to-go containers.
Celeste Blender Cake or just “bolo” a snack cake using what you have. In her words: “add a tablespoon of baking powder and you have cake.”
Today’s bolo:
1 1⁄2 cups Oland Flour from Maine Rusted Rooster Farm
1 tbsp baking powder
1⁄2 tsp coarse salt
3 carrots from food rescue, chopped
4 large eggs (one was frozen)
1 cup sugar
1⁄2 cup oil
Peels from a frozen organic orange and about half of the flesh, seeds removed
Preheat oven to 350°F
In a medium bowl, mix the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
In a blender or food processor, blend for 2 minutes the eggs, oil, carrots,1 sugar and orange.
Add blended mix to the bowl with dry ingredients, mixing well by hand until well combined.
Evenly spread batter into your prepared pan.
Bake for 35-40 minutes or till golden and the toothpick test comes out clean.
Let the cake cool for about 15 minutes before inverting onto a plate.
Now, dear readers, please tell us what foods make you feel kinship?
Love,
Ellie & Amy