When We Were Strangers

When we first came here, the trees frightened me.

It was July 2020, and we had just driven across the country folded into a Kia Soul like clowns into a circus car. Behind the steering wheel was crammed my long-suffering, six-foot-four husband, and beside him sat I and my nine-months-pregnant belly, which seemed to grow by the mile. In the back, legs resting on piles of luggage and a cooler of snacks, sat our five-year-old daughter and our eight-year-old son. He kept repeating our route—Reno, Salt Lake City, Laramie, Omaha, Cooksville—like it was his last link to sanity in a world gone mad.

Ayhan Günay, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

When at last we pulled into the driveway of the house we had bought, sight unseen, it was a midsummer night, and the air was so thick and moist you could almost wring it out with your hands. My husband went inside and sanitized all the doorknobs and countertops before he would let the children and me inside.

As we sat and waited in the driveway, all around us loomed the trees, cacophonous in the dark: branch rubbed against branch, crickets creaked, frogs sang, mosquitos droned, and cicadas revved their wings like a thousand tiny engines.

As dawn crept nearer, I soothed the children as they fretted in sleeping bags on the floor, unsettled by the night sounds. I breathed in and out, fingers splayed against my belly, and felt for reassuring kicks and stretches. The floors of the house tilted underfoot, and I couldn't seem to find level ground. I fought a premonition that the trees would fall and smash the strange house with us inside it.

By the light of day there was, of course, no furniture. There was also no trash service, no potable water, and no internet connection (not just no service, but no cable laid in the ground). But the trees, which stretched all the way down to a lazy creek and the horse farm beyond, seemed friendlier in the morning; the light fell through their leaves in gold-green bars, and the lattice of their branches screened us from our neighbors.

But still, even in those days of fragmentation and fear, the neighbors seemed to know that we had come. Some visited with folding chairs and a card table to borrow until the moving van came. Another dropped in with soup and warm words of welcome. There were brownies baked according to a grandmother’s hand-me-down recipe.

And day by day, the house seemed less strange. We arranged our things, assembled the beds, and put silverware and cups in the cupboards and drawers. We began to belong to its rooms, and they to us. After the baby was born, I stood on the porch with him so he could listen to the cloaking murmur of the trees, a lullaby in the night.

Lately, while all the world seems strange again, I have been thinking about what it means to belong and reflecting on those days when we were strangers in a place we’d never seen.

I am grateful for those small gestures that said we were not alone, and in safety we could put our roots into the ground.

And with grief, I watch while, paraphrasing Howard Thurman, many “have it burned into them that they do not count.” I hope. I write. I worry for the vulnerable in my own house and far away. I cry amid the trees. I do the small tasks to which I can set these two hands. And I yearn and pray for the kingdom of welcome, which, though it seems for a moment farther off, must someday come, when the God of dauntless invitation will draw in the wounded and weary of every nation to His table.