African Window

22 Aug, 08
There are things that make me feel like I’m in Africa, the way that certain songs can make me feel like I’m in a movie that someone cares about watching and the way some fumbling mistake I make or some crazy person I’m interacting with makes me feel like I’m on a candid camera show and people are laughing, but I don’t know it.
I have a fairly normal kitchen, but the window is not normal. The window I look through is African. It has metal pains painted white and a metal latch that is hard to work. It also never closes, so that when the wind howls my window whistles me a cold tune. And it has thin white bars on it to keep me safe. It’s what’s outside my window above my ordinary sink that is the most foreign. I see tall grass blowing underneath our Mulberry tree and lining our homemade brick stoop. And in the near distance is a pre-fabricated shack. Like if there were many, many of these shacks they could be a track shack neighborhood. And in that track shack live three African men who work on this farm doing construction.
And so we have neighbors on each side with no fences to block our lives from one another. Their track shack has no windows so they have a little more privacy than us with our African windows. In the afternoons these men play soccer outside my African window with the metal panes and the cold whistling tunes. They put up two iron posts for a goal and take turns shooting goals at one another. They talk in a loud, jolly, foreign language and end their days with this game in the tall grass. When one scores a goal, the ragged ball goes sailing into the overgrown pear orchard and the man with his turn there goes high stepping after it.
And then I turn around from my African window with the dirty white panes and the streaky glass, the pear trees and the tall moving grass, and black men and I see my home which is remarkably unremarkable and home-like, with pictures of familiar faces taped onto our small refrigerator.
Some time I’m sure we’ll be in a place that feels even more unremarkable and home-like than this. And I’ll remember all the people and scenes that made me feel like I was far from home and at home in South Africa. And I’ll be sad (maybe), but I’ll remember that Annie Dillard says, “enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”