[Note: This was first published in the June 2014 issue of The Bamboo Telegraph, a publication of the American Women’s Association of Singapore, a terrific group of warm and supportive women who will always be close to my heart. TZ]
“The piano is gone!” My daughter noticed the absence right away when she got home from school. It was not unexpected, but even expected departures can be unnerving when they actually happen.
You see we are leaving Singapore, but the piano is staying. It is right that it should stay here. It is a Singapore piano specially designed for this tropical climate. This is its home. Our home is elsewhere. It is time for us to go.
The piano was the very first thing in our Singapore apartment when we moved here four years ago. My husband bought it in the weeks before the kids and I joined him from a young music student who was leaving to continue his studies abroad. It was the first thing I saw through blurry eyes when I walked into the apartment at the crack-of-dawn, fresh off a 19-hour flight from Newark, in the place that would be my home for the next four years. So it is fitting, I suppose, that it was also the first thing to leave the apartment as we prepare to say goodbye.
Before we moved to Singapore, I had a very specific and concrete idea of what “home” was: what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like. I selected objects to bring with us in an attempt to re-create that feeling of home here on the other side of the world: my grandmother’s rocking chair, the desk my husband’s grandfather gave him as a child, a favorite teapot, my books, our instruments. I cooked familiar foods in the tropical heat, filling the apartment with the smells of roasting chicken and fresh baked bread.
It started to feel like home, even though in the backs of our minds we knew our time here was limited. And now we are moving on, off to another adventure on yet another continent, prepared to make a new home for our family.
But something happened here in Singapore, a subtle but definite shift in my idea of “home.” It is less concrete. More ephemeral. “Home” isn’t so much a place anymore. It includes the friends who did not let me drift away when we moved to the other side of the world, and the friends I made here who will always be connected to me. It is my children and my husband and the experiences that tie us together.
But home is also a place. So as I select the objects that will go with us I choose carefully. Our new home will smell like the frangipani oil I so enjoy here. The smells of curry, cardamom and coconut will join the baking bread and roasting chicken in the kitchen. Maybe I can even get some jasmine to grow in pots among the rose bushes.
