Editor’s Note: Christy Berghoef’s spiritual memoir Rooted will be released on Tuesday, July 29. Here is the first chapter. To learn more or order the book, please click here.

My eyes blurred and cleared intermittently for the first several hours of the drive from Washington, D.C., to Holland, Michigan. They filled, then overflowed. Filled, then overflowed again. Bryan was driving the U-Haul crammed with beds, tables, outdoor furniture, and boxes of the things we deemed worth dragging across the country. I followed in the Odyssey toting all four kids and a few precious items that we didn’t want bouncing around in the back of the truck. We white-knuckled our way out of the D.C. morning rush, a stressful route even on a normal day. 

The community with whom I felt absolute belonging, despite all our differences and our variety of views, grew smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror until it vanished completely. That’s the moment it began. My lungs sucked and expelled air in fits and starts while I wept as if someone had not only opened a hose, but walked away and forgotten about it, leaving an expanse of puddles and squishy pools across the lawn. 

The kids were silent. Eerily silent. Quite possibly more silent than four kids aged five through ten confined to car seats have ever been in the history of road trips. They are respecting my grief, I told myself. More likely they were terrified and traumatized by the length and loudness of my wailing. They had never seen me broken down like this. They are going to need therapy, I told myself.

Somewhere just into Pennsylvania the well ran dry. I was empty, dried out like a Southern California reservoir after a ten-year drought. As if waiting for this moment, Winston, my nine-year-old, found the courage to lift his voice onto the stage of silence. “Um, Mom? I really have to pee. We have to stop.” 

I called Bryan in the U-Haul to let him know. We exited just before the Pennsylvania Turnpike to stretch our legs, empty our bladders, and fill our gas tanks and stomachs. My cheeks were like fat warm tomatoes fallen from the vine, not just absorbing the heat of mid-August on the top side but enduring the scourge of decay on the underside. Streaked with salt, the flesh around my eyes was tender and swollen. More than a few folks in the bustling gas station looked on with pity. I assumed they thought we were traveling for a funeral. Or is this just what a woman travelling across the country with four kids in a minivan looks like?

My stomach was too tight and sour and my mouth too dry to be able to eat anything. I opted for orange juice to go. The kids, still tiptoeing around me but clearly happy to be out of confinement, feasted on gas station cheeseburgers and chocolate milk. Before strapping back in for the next leg of the drive, I did some deep breathing and stretching in the parking lot while they ran up and down a small patch of green lodged between the parking lot and the gas station.

After another hour on the road, with me presenting a calmer and more normal version of myself, the kids began getting fidgety and cranky. “How long till we get there?” I was tempted to remind them that back when I was their age, our family of six had to cram into a little 1968 Honda N600 to get anywhere. My two older brothers jostled in a cramped tight backseat, and I sat on pillows on top of the parking brake lever between the front bucket seats while my one-year-old brother climbed around the car like a fat little caterpillar. He wriggled in and out amongst us as he pleased, jabbing with a wild foot or stray elbow from time to time. We were just grateful to be alive in the era of motorized vehicles. I was tempted to say it, but instead slid The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe audiobook into the CD player to settle them down for the duration of the trip. The kids had listened to this so often they had much of it memorized and frequently spoke the lines aloud in unison with the reader. 

The next few hours on the road felt as if I was outside of my body and moving through a tunnel on autopilot. I was traveling through the wardrobe and I wondered if in time I would entirely forget the world I was leaving behind and all I had known and learned there. I wondered if the various ways I had grown would shrivel up and leave me shrinking back down into my old self. 

The landscape outside the window became like one long ribbon caught in the breeze streaming in a blur alongside us, and the storybook began to dwindle down to a smudgy smear of sound. After the long slog through Ohio, we crossed under the big blue “Welcome to Pure Michigan!” sign, and I was jolted to full wakefulness by the notoriously hardscrabble Michigan highways, which tossed the van around as if we were driving down a rough gravel road. My mind began racing. What are we doing here? Will they even want us back home?  All my fears and questions were met with silence as I dodged six-inch-deep potholes. We should have moved somewhere else. I wondered if this pocked warzone road was a warning.

The kids began whooping it up in the back of the van. They were eager to live two flower fields and one alfalfa field away from Grandpa and Grandma and closer to their cousins. In D.C., we lived on a busy street: Sirens screamed day and night and shouting voices swam from open windows across the thick hot soup of summer night air. The ability to roam the wild country would be a welcome contrast. In the thrill of adventure, they seemed easily able to embrace what was ahead and set aside the sadness of missing their friends and neighbors. 

I decided to make an effort to meet them in their enthusiasm. I began the work of burying my grief, fears, and hesitation in order to dig out the little pockets of hope that were hidden inside me. I joined them in pronouncing all the great things that were waiting for us in Michigan. Open fields. Fresh air. Small town. Minimal traffic. Great schools. A yard. A garden. Lake Michigan. Grandpa & Grandma. Sublime, sacred silence.

Maybe this would all be okay after all.

The more mile markers the minivan trundled past, the more both my hopes and fears expanded inside me, while my breath felt squeezed out of my conflicted lungs. The confused state of my insides started spinning, bordering on nausea.

Would the place and people of home ever allow me to really feel at home? I was no longer part of the tribe. I knew that. While my values hadn’t changed, the political expression of those values had shifted. This would be enough to make for a thorny existence in a conservative community. I knew this because there was a time when I was part of the hometown crowd that demonized people who were exactly like the person I had become. Being politically liberal was a grave sin, and I was surethe wider community would tell mein a variety of ways that I was unwelcome, unwanted, andoutside the grasp of God’s grace. 

The increasing joy and excitement on the four little faces bobbing around in my rear view mirror offset my doubts and angst. Somewhere on Interstate 96 I resolved to endure anything as long as my kids were okay. Keeping them feeling safe, loved, valued, and nurtured would be my goal. I gripped the steering wheel and found myself praying that the challenges of coming home would not shatter their sweet enthusiastic spirits.

The landscape outside the window started to become familiar: like an old acquaintance at first, then like a longtime friend, and as we were pulling into a gravel driveway as familiar as family. We were home. The garage door was a mosaic of “Welcome Home” messages from my niece and nephews. An unexpected surprise for the kids. A wee little seed of hope pressed into the soil of my mind. 

We climbed out of the van and stretched the crimps out of our muscles. Squealing, the kids skipped quickly inside like little grasshoppers. The screen door creaked open and slapped shut behind me. This was the house that would be our home. The home that my grandparents built and lived in during the latter half of their lives. The home that sat at the edge of the forty-acre farm my dad grew up on, that I grew up on, and where my parents still lived.

I was flooded with the warmth of nostalgia. It was unexpected. My dried-up eyes started to draw from a restocked reservoir. My memory called up the lingering scent of date-filled cookies, moth balls, Grandpa’s Big Chief chewing tobacco, and Grandma’s Avon skin cream. How were these scents so palpable, given that Gramps and Grams had been gone for years? Their smells must have saturated the carpet, soaked into the walls. 

I swear I could see my grandfather’s bony frame tucked into the corner of the room, sunk in his brown recliner, a stack of books beside him on the table, checkerboard—cracked at the seams and repaired with layers of brittle masking tape—lying open and ready on the leather footstool. He looked up and called out to me, “Christy Rae! I’ve been waiting for you. Let’s go! The board is ready!” I could hear him as he always was. I could hear his voice coming from his corner of the room, through his nearly toothless grin, wet tobacco wad set on the coaster on the table beside him. I squeezed my eyes against the tears trying to escape, aching to turn back the years to simpler times when the world seemed a small and straightforward place, to sit at his feet and wait for him to slide the first worn wooden checker across the board. 

Home.

Everything looked the same. Dark sienna living room carpet with smudges of rust color worked in. Dark walnut cabinets with brass handles straight out of the 1970slining both sides of the tiny galley kitchen. I moved down the hall and peeked into the small bathroom. Mustard yellow tub and golden yellow floor tiles, just as it had always been. One bedroom with lime green shag carpet that was all the rage in 1978 and a second bedroom with more updated cream-colored Berber carpet. The kids scrambled downstairs to run around the wide-open unfinished basement. Winston shouted from the bottom of the stairs, “We can ride our scooters and rollerblade down here!”

I smiled at the thought and moved through the kitchen and out the back door. Stopping just beyond the edge of the yard, I kicked my shoes off, stepped into the field, and sunk my cramped, caged feet into the warm, just-turned soil of the back forty. Robins and blue jays were chattering wildly in the black walnut trees. Song sparrows fluttered at the bird feeder. I gazed across the field where acres of gladiolus were cracking through the soil and my eyes lifted to the woods beyond. Inhaling slowly and deeply, the sun-warmed soil wrapped itself around my feet and the breeze threw open its arms as if to say, “Welcome home.” I let myself fall fully into this unconditional embrace.

The earth knew me. A voice from somewhere whispered to my heart that this patch of earth would love me, accept me, and understand me just exactly as I was, in all my circumstances, regardless of how I fared in the world. Fresh air moved over the alfalfa field, carrying a hint of the neighbor’s milk cows with it before flowing easily and fully through my lungs. My clenched muscles relaxed and eased. All my twisted, anxious nerves unfurled. 

This was the ground that had birthed me, nurtured me, and held me all those years. I knew for certain this ground would hold me still. As I was easing myself into place, a small cloud of dust rose in the distance. I squinted as Mom and Dad emerged, rumbling across the field on the Gator, towards us. The kids ran from the house squealing as their grandma and grandpa approached the yard. A smother of lanky little arms and legs wrapped around my parents like kite string knotted around a willow branch, and they were buried in affection. As that tight knot of love began to dissipate, Mom and Dad looked beyond my children to me, their open arms ready to embrace. I made my way across the yard and fell into them.

I was home.