I was once in a yurt with my stepmother Aynura, who’s from Kyrgyzstan. I asked her about her experience with yurts. My father started dominating her reply, as he tends to (and as I have done, to my own dismay, on numerous occasions), talking about how he’s stayed in chilly yurts while visiting the high country above Bishkek or Lake Issyk-Kul. He noted how the Kyrgyz only moved away from such a nomadic life under Soviet rule, and still carried in their souls a love for the felt roundhouses.
Aynura talked quietly after my dad was finished about how people were beyond such places of habitation now. She didn’t understand why Americans wanted to return to them. Instead of being like old recipes one returns to, often for internal sustenance, she said, they were reminders, like old cars now abandoned, of what people had escaped.
Listening, I ran my toes across the softness of a felt yurt rug and looked at all of us seated in the room. I could tell we liked our four walls, the comforts of a Western room, the safety of a wall behind a head on the bed.
Later, I checked in with an inventor acquaintance who had tried raising his family in a series of yurts on the side of the Catskills Escarpment until his marriage fell apart. We talked. Our kids played. I realized that the shape of yurts — and any other abode — had very little to do with how human relationships evolve or shatter.
My acquaintance told me he had ended up in a series of yurts as a convenience. He needed space to store some stuff, and one thing had led to another. And his family, unlike what I’d suspected, had loved their living arrangement. And still do.
“It’s really the roundness of it that I like,” my friend said, in the midst of deeper conversations. “If you think of what you do in a regular home, you never use the corners …”
I realized that I, like all the kids I’ve spoken with, love the darkness, dustiness and non-efficient elements of corners. The kids suggested that I look at one of their favorite books: Andrew Henry’s Meadow, by the late Doris Burn.
It’s a story of a boy who tries building weird things at home. No one has the time for him, so he runs away through the woods to a distant meadow, where he builds a fort-like house for himself. Gradually, other kids run away from their busy or breaking homes and join him. He builds homes for them, too. A village, of sorts, takes shape, made of treehouses, a bridge-like residence, igloo-styled dirt homes.
The story is pure magic. Best of all, it’s not the kids who are pining for parents but the parents who suddenly awaken from their busy, distracted, emotionally-wrought lives to realize their kids are all gone. They go find them. Everyone ends up very happy.
I delivered a copy of this book to our friends Matt and Laura recently. They are living in a self-made community of off-the-grid Andrew-Henry structures near some power lines. They have a newborn baby. The new mother showed the book to young Achillea after she nursed in a mirror-floored bathtub room with afternoon light streaming down and the smell of fresh-brewed chamomile tea.
For tonight’s nighttime reading I’ve found a copy of Swiss Family Robinson. Being enmeshed in Tintin for weeks now, I doubt we’ll actually read the thing. But there are some pictures I wanted my son to see, particularly the image of the shipwrecked family’s idyllic many-floored treehouse. More honestly, I need to gaze at it myself.
What will I be looking for? The same any of us looks for when we gaze at stars, or landscapes, or home scenes in paintings, films or books. I believe that we’re always searching for places where we feel we belong.
Many of us believe we may already have such a place, and just want to find out if there’s another place just like it, a twin to our own. Or maybe we want to expand what we have into a slightly more nomadic mode, moving from location to location while calling each home. Whatever. We need to become more accommodating to those needs we all have — mothers, fathers and children — for spaces within a family space where our own dreams can survive and thrive.
