Feeling the Distance

So everything is great in London, yada, yada, but when do you miss home?  When do you feel the distance?

Not at the times you might think.  Not the holidays or the special occasions, at least not so far, but instead when you need that safety net you’ve built around you. 

Walking home from dinner late on a Sunday night we realize no one has a key.  I left early with my parents, so I assumed the others left the house with keys as they set the alarm.  A false assumption. 

Now we stand before this house in the cold darkness, a house that has been our home for three months and suddenly it’s a foreign place.

I don’t know how to break in, I can’t even get around to the back yard to see if there is some secret access.  The second floor now appears miles above our heads and even so the windows only open part way.  The place is an impenetrable fortress.

I disturb our next door neighbors who we’ve barely met, a sweet French/English couple without kids who let me and my son scale their back wall to enter our garden to see if we can get in.  They also welcome and warm my parents.  And while they couldn’t have been more accommodating, I’m fairly certain this is not what they planned for a Sunday night.

I experienced the strangeness of peering in on our lives from the outside.  I see my desk, side lamp still on.  I see the coffee cup on the kitchen counter, the open math book, the resting laptop.  I felt a bit like George Bailey looking down at his life, but none of us were there.

Options: 

1.       Call the owners who live outside the city and may be out of the country. 

2.       Break a window that would set off the alarm and I have no idea what alarm company-police station issues that would trigger. 

3.       I could try to force the back door open, it looks weak, but if it doesn’t work, see number two.

There was a real moment of something, panic is too strong a word, but helplessness.  I had no way of getting in and no idea what to do. We were facing the real possibility of checking into a hotel.

We called a lock smith and he said it would be an hour plus.  We called the owners and they weren’t around.  We had no neighbors with keys or friends we could stay with, nothing under the front door mat, no back-up plan.  How could that be?

But then my wife found a woman we had used as a baby sitter and she found a key and we met her at a local pizza place and we thanked our neighbors and made it inside.

It wasn’t the drama of the story, but rather the fear of where to look. We don’t know a locksmith or even the name of the alarm company or the type of lock or how to reach the landlord or whether our neighbors are home or who they are.  We would have answers to all of these were we back home.  The home we now miss.