Excerpt: Churches: Memoir of a Christian Reformed Girl

We are here such a short time this visit, and there is so much to capture: my mother, Karin and me kicking around in this condo that my parents presciently bought shortly after my dad turned 80, a modern, high ceilinged space with off-white walls and lights inset into the slanting ceilings, how soon it became a holy family home space of comfort and love, pictures adorning the half wall around the stairs to the basement, covering every inch of the top of the fridge, the same classic maple dining room table and chairs on the oblong green and beige square lined rug that defines the wide open dining room space from the living room space, where the same faded green cloth chairs—my mother used to cover them to spare them from the Michigan sun coming through the wall of glass behind me—the same couch I was describing with my same daughter on it, the same leather chair with foot rest, that bounces on the belts that extend down from each arm, the same low Baldwin piano that my mom still plays and played this morning, the golden globe pendulum at the bottom of the glassed-in clock ticking next to the sign that says, “Zoals ‘t klokje thuis tikt, tikt ‘t nergens” (“as the clock ticks at home, it doesn’t tick anywhere else”). How this truth could be more true, I don’t know, but like Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, I’d like to remember things present, to hold them permanently in front of me, just like this, with my backpack on one of the dining room chairs, my daughter’s pink wool coat hanging over the back of the same chair, the print of a harbor in Holland, the print of row houses in Amsterdam, the picture of my dad at my nephew’s wedding, his hair flying out over his head like a white cloud of angel dust, his unruly hair, now gone, and I’d like to keep this all here just like this, because I know too well that after a few years, a place can become home, and then, suddenly, it can be gone, and my history of church, which can and must be grounded in the physicality of this place, this town, this state, this America that my grandparents hungered and longed for and found in varying degrees or, in the case of one, found not at all, and then to my daughter I say, “Yes, I am a little crazy about keeping this, capturing it, wanting it forever. But only because I know it cannot be, will not be, and I can’t say much that’s wise about that, simply gather the real objects that carry this meaning, find them wherever I can, including the teddy bear Dutch woman bought at the Dutch store with her triangular Dutch white hat and decorated apron as if she stepped right out of a Franz Hals painting, because she is, he is, my history. In fact, I’m thinking I should have bought the little man in the black pants and red shirt who looked my mother said, just like a old Dutch farmer, because some day, I want to hand all of this history, this love, this faith, this loyalty, this selfhood, right over to another generation, an Anna or a Maartje or a Piet or a Johanness or a Jacobus or any of these rich, ripe names that are as full of cream and fat as the Dutch Goudse kaas that we sampled and then bought and then took home to turn into cheese sandwiches. I want to hold it all right here in my body, because it won’t all fit in the mind.