Through the windowpane

On the last Monday in March, at 16h52, we would get on the bus. The stop is just down the hill on the main street next to the village church before the large arching bridge. It is about a three-minute walk from our house to the stop, but we will want to be early. I would hope to lock the front door by 16h40. I wouldn’t forget the rubbish. We always bin the rubbish while waiting for the bus.

The bus would take us to Istanbul. Not directly, of course, but I had filled the pages of my leather-bound journal with detailed itineraries for the next sixteen days. From the bus, we would take two connecting trains to Zurich. I would make sure we climb upstairs on the second train to the restaurant car near the middle to sit on the righthand side with lake views. We would both get beers. This way we would arrive one hour and twelve minutes before our scheduled departure on the nightly EN40467 to Vienna, our first stop.

This was not just a normal holiday escape. We would embrace a cross-continental rail journey inspired by the belle époque voyages along the Orient Express, an eastward trek across Europe in the spirit of Paul Theroux. The tumbling Alps would give way to wide fields, rolling hills and the nighttime lights of small villages; we would read and watch silently as old people hang laundry in their homes. We would ride the gently rocking carriages of the old European rail empire passing languages, people and old wars through our window as we embraced an unknown eastern world.

Each week our journey neared with increasing determination. A sense of adventure grew in a trip that was never supposed to be simple, heightened by the suspense of an encroaching pandemic — train travel in the time of coronavirus. A spectre of risk was not enough to dissuade two young people from seeing the backwoods of Romania or the magnificent cathedrals of Hungary. The suspense of shuttering borders and passport control would heighten the game, reminding us of an era in which free and open travel across the continent was but a distant dream.

However, determination slowly gave way to scepticism as the moral imperative to stay home grew, as schools shuttered before borders and soon even increased passport control looked like a foregone luxury of gentler times. The decision was made for us. Our slow train to the gates of the Hagia Sophia and banks of the Bosporus was impassable.

How do you come home from a place you never left?

Our dreams had led us along the foreign tracks of ancient places, our guidebooks underarm, our journals prepared, our imaginations teeming already: a friend would join us in Bucharest and I was persuaded to find at least one Armenian church in the ancient caves of Cappadocia. But so rarely has our modern, mobile society made home the great rallying cry of the collective. But here we are, not just a cry but the moral and legal imperative of our lifetime or of our century: be home.

And so I sit with the sun rising gently over the desk in my spare room. The mountains are glowing as dawn crested hours ago along the high spring ridges. The journal is on the coffee table — do I cross through these unused pages?

But not just our travels, what about the other bits of life — events to hold, meetings to make and places to go? Memories of those things that haven’t even occurred and maybe never will. And so from our living rooms and our bedrooms, our small porches or balconies, from our veranda windows or our small bathroom windows we greet the world again. In our departure from the journey, we learn to see our homes again.

For all our talk of travel and culture, rare is it that we must reckon with the true nature of a place. Instagram accounts and guidebooks and scratch maps tally our destinations like trophies. For us who would call travel a hobby — what do we know of the land beneath our feet? That neighbour down the street? With the time and money to fly and jaunt and drive and buy and escape, what do we know about being?

Travel is easy. In our fleeting, sixteen-day journey through the nightscapes of foreign lands, we can all agree on the sights and sounds and people that lightly brush our lives. What we see and feel is real, and the road beneath our feet is real change. But to be present in our homes, in our own lands, in an unfamiliar and difficult routine, that is a different kind of journey. These four walls and our plot of earth. This is our world. It always has been, wherever you are and wherever you live. But do we really see it?

If we find beauty in the walls, the window outside, a walk around the block, a passing smile in the grocery shop or the dancing light of shadows to end another day — hold it gently. I love my home, but for many, this is not an easy path to walk. It is in brushing against the small details that you truly travel and only then begin to love the world.

We do not abandon the dream of leaving. I’ve been okay to leave the pages of my planning journal unanswered. Pencil sketches can be picked up again, trains rebooked. But now, we have been asked to turn new pages and never has the blankness of empty lines felt so imposing — or if I pause, the silence so fulfilling.

The mornings here are cold. Sometimes over the course of a bright day the sun warms our plateau and our pasture grass is just a little greener. But other days, misty clouds settle around us and flakes of snow filter through clouds like someone lost. We take walks in the evening, once the day’s work has been put away. We wander up through the pine forest and watch gnats swarm above the thawing dirt. I look out through the trees to see our white mountains swathed in a flaming red glow. France is in the distance there, the border shut. I think of the pain and I pray quietly for the dead.

Spring is the season of the bright unknowing, a bridge from darkness to new life. We would do well this year to cling to such a bridge. To breathe deeply of the seasons and to trust this journey through our home. A lengthening light plays in the windowpane as we come to know that place for the very first time. Today is one of the bright days.

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