We are in our last four weeks here in Turkey. It is hard to believe that this life has only 28 more days and then our lives will look and sound so different. It is all the little things that make up life that I am speaking of here. And really, when you break down what your life looks like it is really just a compilation of the smallest things, the things we tend not to even notice. You combine all those small things with the important people in your life and you have a full life. I'm not quite ready to face all the goodbyes to the important people yet, but I am aware of all the small things these days. We are saying goodbye to all the small things that have been our life these past four and a half years. The sights and sounds and smells and smiles that don't pack up in our bags. They can't be hung on the walls of our next house but will with no doubt decorate the spaces of our minds and hearts for a long time. And though we are happy about all the hellos on the other end and the breakfast cereal and certain conveniences of life in America, the small things that will make up our life there are not with us now. Strangely, over time they were replaced by new sights and sounds and smells that made a home in us. Not a one of us can recall when exactly Turkey became home to us, but it has. Now in the midst of packing and planning we are walking around fully aware of all the small things that make this life familiar, make it home, make it hard to leave and important not to forget.
As we board that plane in a few weeks, our awareness of the change taking place will be huge and have little buffer. We will get on that plane and leave this life of ours in Turkey, pass through the sterile environment of airport terminals and in the course of a day, arrive in a different world called "home". A place that has always been and will always be home, but a place that though familiar will not automatically be "home." The exchange of the small things that make up life will begin again, much as it did four and a half years ago when we moved to Turkey. Even though we've been through this change before, and presumably went through the harder half of knowing nothing when we came, it feels nearly as hard. Partly because one can reason that it shouldn't be as hard, that going home is easy compared to coming to a foreign land. But I will say, contrary to what seems logical, that enough has changed in us in these last years of sojourning here, and enough has changed in our absence, that though we return to our home country, we return as foreigners who will have to find our way into a new life again. It may appear easy but it will feel hard.
As for the small things that make up our life here, all the small things that I will miss, that I now work to memorize and in the years to come may have to work to bring to mind, they are many. They are found outside my window, they are heard in a myriad of familiar knocks at my door, they are the constant sounds that penetrate our walls and come in our windows, they are seen on the way to all the familiar places. They are the clouds that travel these parts, the song birds I have yet to identify in a book, the laundry being hung out to dry in white or in color. They are the knock that brings a little girl of five, the knock that brings the boy of nine, the knock that brings a plate of food or a visit or the water or the mail. They are the calls to prayer that echo in the night and early morning, loud enough to wake me up but common enough to sleep through, and the dogs barking along. They are the voices of children I know and the voices of their mothers in reply, the sound of a soccer game down below, the sound of the elevator bringing up a guest or my kids home after school. They are the people we meet and greet everyday in everyday places: the shy smile of the woman at the corner store, Mert down below waiting for the service bus, Fatma hanging her laundry as the kids come home from school, the men on security at the door at school. It is the people everywhere: the men gathered in the hills or the sides of the road drinking tea or beer, it is the crowded buses and bazaars, the little girls playing house on a rug outside, the women gathering against the shade of a building to visit, the crowds of kids dressed in their uniforms coming home from school. It is the advice on parenting, the expressed concern for my children when they eat ice cream, the way everyone mothers and brothers and bosses you around here. It is the specific details of a dish that is made without a recipe, the buying of vegetables in season, of bartering for the best price and walking home with your cart full behind you. It is the way I cast my eyes down when passing men in the street, the serious look on womens' faces as they maneuver the city, the way in which you feel you are living in a man's world. It is the fully covered woman in black sitting beside a young girl in a mini skirt, the villas of the rich next to a neighborhood resembling the villages. It is the thoughtful phone call, my birthday never missed by a friend, the lectures when I don't call back right away, the visit that is repaid and the way no one ever shows up empty handed at your door. It is traffic and smog, the bus, the taxi, the ferryboat, train and tram that can get you anywhere. It is the gift giving, the generosity, the invitation to come and the saying that they'll be waiting for when we come again. It is the leave taking, the coming to the door, the waving all the way down the staircase and the way they'll be looking from their window as you leave their building. It is the formalities, the daily exchanges, the salaams to everyone when you go, the greeting with a kiss, the leaving with a kiss. It is the sharing of a meal, the way you are always a guest, the way there is always time and never a schedule, the wonderful hospitality. Even the irritations, the constant and tiredness of being a foreigner, the misunderstandings and being misunderstood, they all work into these small things that make life here life. I will dearly miss the smallest things.
