An old college friend now living in Paris recently had to sell her coop apartment in New York, her former home. Emailing a group of us, she considered what she was really losing: “Is New York still my home? Do I even have a home? What does home even mean anyways when my family is so scattered and I am on my own?”

Living where we do, 12,000 miles from the nearest American coastline, this one hits home — as in, the one in the gut. It’s a question we constantly mull over. We talk about “going home” some day. For now, our bikes and bed and a group of friends are in Portland, Oregon and we are enough attached that it will draw an up or down vote at some point. But usually we’re speaking more loosely about returning to the old country, lofting back into place our passports came from. Which is to say, home is very much unresolved.

Meanwhile, in this foreign place of Arabic prayer calls, catcalls (for her), and Hey Misters (for both of us), we step to a faintly familiar rhythm. Our house is a finely arranged pleasure, with smooth tile floors, cool concrete walls and a Mediterranean look that would be in character in Southern California. (The owners, a contractor and an economist, voraciously read architectural magazines). We steadily add our photographs and plants and lamps to the rooms and patios. I reflexively duck under the low ceiling on the way upstairs and haven’t hit my head in months. We know to expect some leaking near the kitchen in a heavy rainstorm, and we know how long it will take fruit skins to attract ants when left on the kitchen counter.

In the neighborhood, the fresh bread baked by a Costa Rican ex-pat arrives at the local store at 5 in the afternoon. The fish traders pull their motorcycles onto the street with shrimp and tuna at 9 am. I can play ping-pong most evenings between five and six with the teenagers on the other side of the mosque.

And last Saturday morning we had blueberry pancakes.

There are few things that embody home more. On every Saturday morning that I can remember growing up, first in Boston then San Diego, there were blueberry pancakes plumping up downstairs and a sweet, buttery smell in the air. Later, when I started hustling off to play sports at dawn or, alternatively, slept through the breakfast hour, there would always be bowl of batter waiting on the counter when I finally settled into the kitchen. The prized mornings were those visiting Fire Island, New York, when my mom, having worked the wild bushes, would turn the pancakes deliciously tarty with the local berries.

This summer, chatting online with a stepsister who was visiting the parents, I asked What’s for breakfast? Lighting quick reply. Blueberry pancakes, of course!

A few weeks ago, a surprise guest showed up in the Aceh bulek market: canned blueberries, with OREGON stamped across the black label. Oregon’s berries, reared in cold, wet springs followed by warm, dry summers go toe to toe with any I’ve ever had. In our last home, I always gravitated towards the juicy clusters of blackberries and marionberries, but the blues are none too shabby. And more to the point, they’d somehow made it here, to the tip of Sumatra.

I was torn: the food miles. What would all the Portland, Oregon locavores, eating only stuff from the local growers, say about this choice?

Hayley bought them anyway, thank God. After I braved the Indonesian instructions on the pancake batter box (I figured out it was “add water, an egg and stir”), she opened the can and we smothered the ‘cakes in the berries. They were a shade chalky. But they went down easy, because they were blueberries and in this corner of the world it was Saturday morning. And we were home.

Take care until next time,
Oakley