Missing.

“Mommy, I miss the shops in Kenya”.  I think automatically she means Mama Kwamboga’s shop where we went daily for bread and conversation.  But she says she likes the shops better there because they have tiny carts for the kids to push.  Then I know she means the super markets in the city we would visit once every 6 weeks.  I hated those shopping trips to the giant stores that exposed my bulk consumption in the midst of a society of minimal means.  I would hear the clerks checkout my items in quantities they couldn’t fathom and they'd remark softly in Kiswahili about the greediness of Americans.   So I reduced our consumption to sooth my guilt and go through the painful enculturation process.   But Little Miss didn’t know all of these things, she just enjoyed driving her own tiny cart around the store. And the way that Kenyans love children and yet don't idolize them either.





Today we were driving back from another exhausting American exercise in consumerism and the shuffle of  songs came suddenly:
"On Jordan's Stormy Banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye..." 
The tune has been buried down deep in our hearts from the times when we were strangers in a strange land singing loudly over the muddy roads "I am bound, I am bound, I am bound for the Promised Land". 
Her eyes look down and her lips pucker out.  We are lurched back into that memory.
"I want to see Ellie" she says mournfully.

Man Cub left his Neverland.  He climbs a banister in our rental house now and the muscle memory makes his mouth blurt out “I miss Loquat hill”: the steep bank of terraced hillside at Tenwek where he and his age mates would climb trees, eat the loquat fruits and absorb mud.

In Kipsigis language, “missing” means very good. It’s a reply to “how are you”.  So I started thinking of missing as a positive thing rather than negative.  I'm glad they miss it.   What if they didn’t miss it?  That would be even worse.

Nowadays I drink cold bitter coffee alone at 10 am, where it used to be hot creamy chai with friends at 10 every day. I prayed that I would not be bitter over things there.   It isn't all sweet memories of course.  And God has heard my request.  My heart is not bitter, it is warmed by the goodness of God's mercy, even in the tears.  I am thankful for the deep drink of a life living a dream that we were given. 

And it’s a severe mercy to endure the end of something we love rather than to endure the end of love.  (Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy”)