In many ways, my life and its surroundings are in transition. In many ways, my life is just smoothing out after eighteen months of constant transition. A list I’ve been making as I reflect on adjustment(s):
1. This is the first time I’ve at all slowed down since before I left for college. Really, since before I left for Kenya the first time in 2009.
1.25. I’ve still got multiple to-do lists waiting to be checked off and yesterday it was until after 8pm that I sat down for more than 20 minutes.
1.50. Some days I think slowing down is overrated, and some days I think it would be really nice to just sit by the water with a good book and a cup of ginger tea.
2. The next 3 months are the longest I will have been home since December 2011.
2.25. This home is almost all in boxes and in 5 days I’ll be calling new walls ‘home’.
3. I’ve hardly spent any sustained time in this city for 2 years and yet I’m finding it oddly life-altering to have to readjust my travel routes to a new starting and ending point.
4. Maybe it’s all the packing or maybe it’s that this is the first time I’ve stopped moving long enough to think, but I keep having to remind myself why I’m not headed down 75 toward Durham, NC right now.
4.25. You told me, in between one of the sixteen times I made that 10-hour drive, that one of the greatest talents a person can have is being able to hold a conversation.
4.50. I’m not particularly traditional in my faith and I don’t really even know what it means, but I have Psalm 23 hanging above my bed because it was your favorite.
4.75. Sometimes I listen to the song Uncle Greg played at your funeral when I fall asleep.
4.90. I miss you, Grandpa.
5. As I walked into the restaurant the other night, I looked around to see if you were working and we could catch up like we’d done before, Jake. And then I remembered.
5.25. One time I drove you home late at night and you told me on 465 East about how you’d learned in your life that it was about treating others with kindness and respect and that even if you didn’t follow the traditions, you could see how that was what religion was all about, too.
5.50. I learned a lot from you.
6. In the last eighteen months, I attended 3 funerals as a family member and wished but was unable to attend 3 additional as a friend, peer, and classmate. I wouldn’t mind if my black dress is able to collect some dust this year.
7. Sometimes I catch myself having conversations in my head in Swahili just so I can pretend for a moment that I’m there. And then I get mad at myself for floating away from the present.
7.25. I told my advisor that I was afraid to fall in love with Senegal. I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is.
7.50. The other night as I looked through photos of a group’s first arrival at the Nairobi airport, I was transported back to the very first time I stepped onto Kenyan soil and breathed in its air. I felt that surge of joy as if it were June 12, 2009 all over again.
7.75. I hope that the answer to that fear doesn’t stop that joy from overcoming me as I step into Dakar in 90 days.
8. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in Kenya that I forget to recognize and be grateful for how much the last year and a half in this country, with this family and community, has taught and bettered me.
8.25. I feel like I’m becoming one of those strong people, and I’m proud of that.
9. In a memory book my Papa wrote to us grandchildren long ago, a question: if you could do your life over, what would you change? His answer: I think I’d like to live it all over again just as it was.
9.25. I strive for my answer to be the same, whenever it may come.
callie daniels-howell 