I am sitting at the kitchen table, looking out over the backyard absentmindedly with a slow Friday morning cup of coffee. The day is gray, overcast, damp; the bark of the trees is dark as if with rain. My eyes slowly focus on the trunk of the black walnut tree directly opposite me. Something is different, strange … the bark looks like it’s weeping. And then I notice three fresh, light-colored ovals where yesterday there were long, magnificent branches. The power company’s tree trimmers have been at work; I realize with sadness that they’ve cut off the only limbs I could ever reach. Now I want to weep, too.

I’ve looked out this window during more than 30 years’ worth of meals; during essay writing, cookie baking, jam making, pea shelling; during family game nights and dinner parties; through solitary reveries and tears. I know the moods of the morning light and when the deepening dusk will finally force us to turn on the overhead lamp. I know these things without consciously knowing them because this is home, the only home I’ve ever known.

And yet …

On the tip of Belfast Lough at the edge of Northern Ireland sits a sturdy house of whitewashed stucco with green and gold crenulated trim. An elevated walkway connects the larger wing to Blackhead Lighthouse, perched nearly on the brink of the cliff. Beyond that – the sea. My parents and I stayed there for three glorious October days a few years ago. My mom had always dreamed of staying in a lighthouse, so we were all excited about the visit, but, from the moment we stepped over the threshold, I somehow knew I was home. Inside the house it was all dark woods and creamy walls hung with crewel embroideries, antique prints and paintings of ships and the sea. Pale light streamed in through tall, thick-paned windows, and in every room there were countless cupboards to explore. My room upstairs looked out over the lough, and every morning I saw the blazing sun rise out of the water. Magic fairly oozed from the keyholes, and even the books stocking the shelves were some of my favorites. I called it the Kingdom by the Sea.

We left the morning of my 29th birthday. Blackhead Lighthouse and its keepers cottage belong to the Irish Landmark Trust, but a part of my heart will always belong to it.

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,

And they lay on their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

– G.K. Chesterton

As much as I love my home with its kitchen window and view of the black walnut tree, sometimes I have a burning desire to be anywhere but here, to be off seeing new lands or retracing the paths of previous adventures. Yet, when I have been away somewhere, there is nothing better than the quiet delight and satisfaction of coming back home again. Why is this?

G.K. Chesterton was a man who deeply understood the paradoxical feeling of being homesick at home, of the strange longing that pulls us away from comfortable firesides and familiar faces and sends us searching for something … something … though we don’t quite know what it is. In Chesterton’s novel “Manalive,” the madcap character Innocent Smith at one point says, “But don’t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden — to something we have had, to something at least we have heard of?”

Smith sets off on a journey around the world so that he can come home again. Along the way he meets a man living alone high in the Sierra mountains and tries to explain the reason for his strange journey.

“I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile,” he says. The other man replies that his grandmother “would have said that we were all in exile, and that no earthly home could cure the holy homesickness that forbids us rest.” Smith thinks for a moment, then says “I think your grandmother was right … I think that must be the reason, the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased. But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.”

The hermit of the high Sierras doesn’t quite understand this, so Smith continues his explanation. “I mean … that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all. 

“He has put eternity into man’s heart,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes. Our first parents enjoyed perfect beauty and belonging together with God in the garden before the fall; surely that memory passed on to their children. It may be, then, that our discontent is a witness of the eternity in our hearts – an echo of Eden. It may be that our homesickness at home is a signal of our souls’ hunger for Heaven. And it may be that the particular places we love and cherish here in this life are tiny tastes of the exquisitely personal place our Lord has lovingly prepared to bring us home to.

I don’t know what my house in Heaven will look like, but I wouldn’t be surprised if across from the kitchen table is a generous window through which all the shades of eternal daylight will pour. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, out in the garden reborn, there’s a black walnut tree with limbs low enough to climb.

Visit Amelia’s website: www.innocenceabroad.com 

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