Home and Where I've Been

Haley Stewart here! I’ve been procrastinating on moving my email subscribers over to Substack and actually beginning to write here. So if you subscribed and then got radio silence for months, mea culpa! 

But I do have some valid excuses for the delay. The past year has been marked by huge changes for my family.

• After seven years in Texas, we moved back to our hometown of Tallahassee, FL.

• For the first time in my life, I traveled to Europe…and then I went back twice to lead pilgrimages in the UK.

• I started a new job and so did Daniel.

• The kids started Catholic school after homeschooling forever and then we moved across the country and they started all over at a new school.

• We sold a house and bought a house. Packed, moved (nightmarish experience but I won’t go into it), and started to unpack.

• My latest non-fiction book, Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life released. My first two children’s books (in the series affectionately referred to as “mouse nuns”) release this fall.

• The whole family got Covid twice. Hildie (age 4) also got RSV and my 2nd bout of Covid triggered Shingles. Lots of fun!

My head is still spinning.

But we’re home. In one sense, wherever we’ve been together for the past 16 years of marriage has always been home. And we loved the life we built in Waco. Can home be built anywhere? Yes, I believe it can. But there is something strange and beautiful about settling back in to life in the same place where I was born.

There are things you just don’t notice when you’ve always lived somewhere. What’s distinctive is so familiar that it feels like the default. (It’s like the clothes in Nora Ephron films of the 90s that I saw when I was about 10 years old. Kathleen Kelly’s wardrobe is just the sartorial baseline. It’s not until watching You’ve Got Mail with my kids that I realize it’s not that way for them.) After spending so long somewhere else, the muggy Florida jungle of my childhood no longer feels like the default. All its wild weirdness fills me with awe.

When I drive down Tallahassee’s canopy roads or sit on the front porch in the evening and hear the night bugs and owls, the familiar soundtrack of my childhood–there is something in my soul that is comforted. Especially after the tumultuousness of parenting in a pandemic and all our life changes, reconnecting with the forgotten things of my youth is somehow healing. 

I’m reminded of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem in honor of Our Lady: “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.”

World-mothering air, air wild,

Wound with thee, in thee isled,

Fold home, fast fold thy child.

As I walk the dog along our street of live oaks covered in Spanish moss, the cat chasing the lizards in the grass, and vines threatening to take over any untended square inch of earth I’ve thought of these lines of Hopkins. As I take deep breaths of the humid air of this swampy land, the heavy air itself encircles me. On the muggiest days, you almost feel resistance in the water-filled air as you walk. It’s like the feeling you get when you try to run in a swimming pool. To those who dislike humidity, the idea that the air hugging you might be comforting rather than disgusting is hard to believe. But for me, being enfolded by the air feels safe like I’m a little girl again.

In one of my earliest memories, I was probably three or four and I was sobbing. I don’t remember why. Perhaps I hurt myself or perhaps I misbehaved and got in trouble, or perhaps I was simply overtired and falling apart. But my mother was holding me in her lap and rubbing my back and singing to me. And I vividly remember looking at the carving that decorated the back of the wooden rocking chair over her shoulder where I was resting my head. And slowly, slowly my sobs became hiccups. My tears were wiped away. And I was safe in her arms.

World-mothering air, air wild,

Wound with thee, in thee isled,

Fold home, fast fold thy child.

I’ve been folded home. And I’m grateful to be here.

I hope to use this space to share my writing and updates on my book projects, but considering that I have four kids and a full-time job (a dream job as a children’s book editor!) I can’t promise anything other than the very occasional email. Maybe someday I’ll start a paid subscription with regular postings, but for now, everything is free (and infrequent). Perhaps when we’re unpacked and truly settled in, I’ll have some brainspace for this platform. But in the meantime I just want to share a few exciting things:

The first two books in my Sister Seraphina Mystery series for young readers are ready for pre-order!

The books are being published by Pauline and they’re about an order of mouse nuns who live in an abbey and run a school for village mice under the floorboards of G.K. Chesterton’s house in Beaconsfield, England. Inspired by Father Brown, the Sisters of Our Lady Star of the Sea also solve local crimes.

The Pursuit of the Pilfered Cheese is the first in the series and the second (and my personal favorite of the series) is The Curious Christmas Trail. I’ll tell you the whole story about how the series came to be another time. It’s a good story. 

And I have a few speaking events coming up:

• The Catholic Imagination Conference at the University of Dallas (September 30th and Oct 1st)

• The Well-Read Mom Conference in the Twin Cities (October 14th-15th)

• And the Together in Holiness Conference in Oklahoma City (October 29th)

If you’re attending, I’d love to see you there.

Until next time! Thanks for subscribing. I’m glad you’re here.