Every Skinny Tree

The Fifth Year is Wood:
Holy Days and Holy Matrimony in Postmodernity

In this, our fifth year or marriage, my husband and I bought a house. It was built in 1928 with hard wood floors, lathe and plaster walls and huge kitchen cabinets. Tradition says the first year of marriage is paper and the 25th is silver. The fifth year is wood and so it seems fitting that we are becoming very familiar with this wooden structure that we so affectionately call “the new house”. Even as I write this, my husband is down on his knees, working slowly with a belt sander over every inch of the Douglas Fir bathroom floor. We are trying as hard as we can to have all our stuff moved in before we lock it up and leave for Christmas.
People ask us “But why did you buy a house if you are just going to be thousands of miles away for the holidays? Are you even getting a Christmas tree?” I jokingly reply that we have bought enough wood this year; we don’t need awholenother tree. But the real answer is in the question: the holidays are holy days and in order to keep them holy I will leave my new house behind and cleave to my husband’s traditions.
For years I lived with the idea of being “home for the holidays” under the modern dictum that you can never really go home again. Moving away from my mother’s house, moving on like a truly modern woman, and asserting my independence became more important than holidays at home. I searched for new and better ways to keep the holidays holy. I went to church or spent the days with the homeless. I thought making myself a stranger (strangering, if you will) to the house I grew up in was a fine choice. I thought that somehow the strangering was an important part of growing up. But then I went and got married.
My husband’s parents have been married for 35 years. They have lived for the past 27 in a rambling, pinkish, 1970’s house in California (they recently installed new laminate flooring and solid granite kitchen countertops—it is pretty much the opposite of our little wooden house in Seattle). Like Ruth and Naomi, those people who live in that funny little house of sheetrock and tile have become my people so we will fly south on Christmas Eve to be with them for the holiday.
In the Postmodern turn, time and space between houses, people, and even holy days are no longer as quantifiable as they used to be. By taking a plane I can shorten the time it takes to move through the space between houses, or I can elongate the amount of time it takes by taking a train.
I have no idea how far apart the two houses are because I cannot perceive the distance according to how long it takes to travel it. I have no idea how long it ought to take to make the journey; I will fasten a seat belt and fall asleep. I won’t even feel the time passing as I travel. The question is no longer “can I go home again?” Instead I ask myself, “How willing am I to travel there and back again, through immeasurable time and unknown space, in order to seek the holiness of relationship?”
Because of my commitment to my husband and his family, I spend holidays traveling from one house to another and back again. Family swings me, like a pendulum during the holidays.
As a gift to me, my husband is buying train tickets for our return from Christmas in California so we can do a little time traveling. Time traveling—not in an attempt to go back in time, but to slow down the journey. It is still a little difficult for me to move too quickly from one house to another. It sometimes feels like my heart can’t keep up with my body.
It is nice to make postmodern travel arrangements, which allow me to choose for myself how long it will take to get back to our house, and subsequently, how far I am from one house or the other at any given moment. But in order to do so I have to give up the modern ideal of the perfect holiday that asserts my independence and superiority over traditions that require physical, if not emotional, dependence on wonky family relationships.
After four years of swinging, I am finally willing to be caught up in the rhythm of the swinging from one point to another and back again, like a pendulum. At each end of the arc, at each high point, I stop and rest and I know it is a holy rest, a holy time, maybe even a holy day. “As for me and my house” we choose to swing through space and time, as immeasurable as they have become. And we hope that this back and forth movement, this liquid (post?)modern way of leaving and cleaving will strengthen the fragile ties between one home and another.
Home is a holy place and getting there and back again is like pilgrimage. But this pilgrim is no longer strangering through the wilderness, moving, like a modernist, away from all I know just to prove that I can.
The bundle of modernist ideas that ruled Christian marriage for decades do not apply to me. I am not necessarily expected to stay home with kids and make my own traditions. I am expected to move freely, pack a bag and step off the creaking floorboards of my new house, fly over acres of land and water on a sturdy wind to the house where my husband grew up. Setting up house is no longer so important (or so holy) as hugging my nephew on Christmas morning. Then we will return, with steel wheels clacking beneath us and return to hastily packed boxes of books. We will put our weight once again onto pocked oak floor a thousand miles from the ones we love simply because that is how we choose to live in holy matrimony during the holidays.
Like a pendulum swinging, I am never finished traveling, never stuck in one place. I do not feel trapped by hardwood promises or tied to the kitchen by ligneous vows. I am not asked to stay longer or farther away than I am willing. A specific place or amount of time in that place or traveling to that place, no matter how deeply ingrained or expensive, is not a sticking point or a burden. I am no longer trapped by solid time and space; postmodern marriage is more about relationships.
Relationship calls to me across the miles during the holidays. Even though it is the modern inventions that move my body back and forth, the postmodern mindset keeps my idea of home just liquid enough to allow for fluid holy days in relationship rather than rushed and bestrangered family gatherings. In the postmodern turn time and space are no longer more solid or more measurable than relationship.
A wooden house is valued according to how solid it is. But in liquid modernity home is no longer a solid idea, and neither is going back there a regression. Home is no longer one place to go, something to run from or somewhere that will protect us forever.
My husband and I pray that during this, our year of timber and planks, we will go home again and again, that moving doesn’t mean moving away but always toward, and that our five year old marriage vows are hardening just a little—just enough—into something strong with which we will build a relationship to come home to.

Abigail Jimenez
Monday, December 10, 2007
Dr. Dwight Friesen