A raspberry woven basket from my favourite Kenyan craft market holds a collection of tea lights in pastel shades of vanilla, cinnamon and sage. It sits beside a lemon-yellow and cornflower-blue teapot with two handles, safely carried from Poland half way around the world and back. Under the heavy teapot is a matching stand to house the little candle, with a new wick ready to catch light and melt the wax with a splutter before sending a warm rose-scented glow into the tea and a little way over the solid wooden table.
This first table of my own is a symbol of finally putting down roots in my home country. I have a lot of beautiful things; memories of three years here and three years there. Memories of a global nomad. The thing I don’t have to hand ever is the special long lighter to light the candle. I used to light it off the gas flame in my old kitchen in Bulgaria, but now we have an electric cooker. I don’t like electric!
This seems to be a pattern I want to change. I have a surfeit of wonderful things from around the world, but I still spend precious time searching for what is missing. Often it’s something banal that lots of people misplace like keys, phone or wallet. Sometimes it’s not so tangible. But, many times it’s something that has particular value because I’m attached to it. It may evoke a place or a home I once loved or perhaps it simply does the job in a superior way, like the special long lighter that I put in a special place so I wouldn’t lose it.
Matches suffice this time. Once the tea light is lit, the mood changes and everyone relaxes. The familiar smell of sulphur as the flame catches on the waxy wick is a relief and the tiny glow of light is reassuring. All is well in my home sweet home. The teapot is warming. We’ll all have tea.
Memories of buying the teapot bubble up. I used to walk to the Boleslawiec pottery shop next to Wilanow Palace Park in Warsaw, hurriedly pushing the pushchair and slowly freezing. I didn’t see any other mothers braving the winter ice. In summer I would pass by benchfuls of seemingly happy mums, and wonder what it was like to be them. I’d catch odd words I knew as they marveled at their friends’ gossip, keeping one ear and one eye out for the little ones, calling to them mid-story to slow down, calm down or come back.
“Nie tak szybko, uspokoić się, chodź!”
I didn’t have any Polish friends. There were no lifelong bonds of antenatal classes for me. I’d arrived in Poland from Kenya with my baby still growing inside me. I’d given birth in a Polish hospital without much Polish yet; the best out of three hospitals I’d visited, full of hope and blazing a trail for other foreign spouses to argue for a local birth. I’d cried on a bench outside the worst hospital. Then the Warsaw baby group met just once a week around a different expat coffee table each time. The pleasure of company was marred by the need for vigilance. Once, my toddler butted three young heads in as many seconds on his way out of the door. My heart sank beyond my boots and I kept on heading for the isolated safety of my car. I knew he would sleep from exhaustion and I was jealous of this promised respite. Perhaps, like me, he couldn’t take the strain on his senses. Too loud, too bright, too many choices. Sometimes, I’d get half an hour parked outside my house before the screaming, wailing exit from car seat and flailing entrance to home. But waiting in the car wasn’t an option in a Polish winter with icicles as long as light sabers hanging from the gables. Walks were brief and brisk, cut short before noses froze solid in minus 20 degrees.
The pottery shop was warmth. Friendly, familiar faces welcomed me inside. I’d pray for more time before the change in temperature woke up a sleeping Joseph. Precious time to absorb the palette of earth, sky and sunshine in the maze of traditional pottery, teetering in towers, stacked on stands and buried in baskets. I loved them all, but the designs in sunflower yellow and peacock blue were like a magnet pulling me closer because they were the cheeriest. I’d feel the surge of excitement as my eyes alighted upon that elusive shallow coffee cup and matching saucer. The joy of choosing just one more piece of pottery to add to the collection at home was enough to last until next time. Sometimes a cup and saucer, sometimes a plate. Sometimes spots and sometimes squiggles. Once, I bought a Christmas tree in the same yellow and blue design with little stars cut out of its sides for a tea light to illuminate our Christmas table.
I had a lot of coffee mornings in a lot of countries and they always wore me out. How did those other mothers make it look so easy? Some of them had formal dinner services in windowed dressers – standard issue for their husband’s grade at the Embassy. We took our pottery from Poland to China. But my house in China felt too small and even my impressive collection of Polish pottery didn’t bolster my confidence in the expat compounds. My son didn’t make the grade of social conformity at his international school either. “One of the boys at school bit Jake!” said the woman indignantly, coffee cup poised to sip from as she held everyone’s attention with the hint of scandal. “That was my son.” I said quietly, sucking that expectant air from the room with halting breath. Another sinking heart to carry home in the back of my car, driven through smoggy Beijing streets by the stoic Mr.Wong to my townhouse in the gated ghetto of coffee morning land.
Birthday photos show different cakes on different tables surrounded by different guests in different clothes. As we shifted from Poland to China, from Bangladesh to Bulgaria, only the pottery stayed the same and I began to order my life’s memories by countries, rather than years.
I never found what I was searching for in all those countries. Now, the pottery cups are sitting half full on my superbly solid wooden table in the delightfully English village of Haslingfield. The special long lighter still eludes me, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve found what I was looking for and it was there all along.
Circumference II - Spring/Summer 2015 