Keys
My keyring holds the weight of the places I’ve loved. It hangs, awkwardly, from the lock of a new and temporary home, swaying slightly with remembered motion, and as it swings, I see flashes of who I used to be. The Ingles card (weathered), the Martins card (weathered), the library cards (fresh with intended use), and the gym fobs (pristine) offer glimpses of color between the solid gleam of the keys: car, house, PO box, golf cart,[i] and, I think, a lock I left on a Paris bridge a decade and a half ago.
I never had a key to my house growing up because the doors were always open, but I remember my mother’s work keys. They opened up room after room, closet after closet, at my home church, because if you’re in charge of caring for children, you need access to the kitchen, to cleaning supplies, to educational supplies, to playrooms, to outside, and back inside. (You need access to the sacred, too, but the sanctuary and the nursery were never locked.) With these keys, all the silent corners of the church were open to me. Maybe this is why I imagine the quiet sacredness of the cleaning lady, the one who walks with practical reverence into the holy of holies before and after the high priest, with vacuum cleaner, dusting cloth, and service in hand. From childhood, I knew in an almost mystic way that the church belonged to me and I belonged to the church, all because of these keys.
Later, as an adult, I would never feel more loved, more myself, than when I had keys to a building: the planetarium, the outreach building, the church, the library, the churches, my office, the library again. Maybe what my soul craves is trust and recognition. Maybe I want multiple spaces to call home. But I always chafed against those opening and closing shifts at food service jobs, waiting, sometimes shivering, sometimes sweating, always faintly smelling of cigarette smoke, for the manager to arrive or to finish locking up. Why not trust me with this building?, I’d think. I know what it’s like to undertake a burden of care.
To have keys is to have a burden of care, I think. Buildings are not the same as people or societies, but they matter in their own way. I remember how distraught congregants were when the doors were replaced on the first church I served. “I walked through those doors every Sunday of my entire life,” one member said. “Going through those doors was how I got to God.” And sure, the Church is not the building, the Church is the people, but there is truth here. We live in bodies and bodies exist in space and interact with matter, so the shape of the world around us affects us. Buildings mediate our connection with the earth, with the divine, and with each other. When a building is lost, a way of connecting is severed. Caring for a building is a way of caring for others.
A few days ago, I called out to my partner after hearing the jingling crash of metal dropping to the floor. “I’m fine,” he said from down the hall. “Just taking all the extra stuff off my keys.” Those bright strips of laminated paper, the signs of the homes we’ve made together, slid off the steel of his keyring with no effort at all. His keys are lighter, I bet, or maybe he just made room for the symbols of his new job: keys to the church, his office, the PO Box, the house. He doesn’t cling to spaces like I do. His sentimentality shows up in other ways.
When we left Virginia, I made him walk through the townhouse with me one last time. I dragged him along as we thanked each space, each room, every nook and cranny. This place was the wilderness I had wandered in after leaving parish ministry. These doors had welcomed me in when I came back from work smelling like sweat and baby formula, or sweat and a patron’s beer, or sweat and old books. These walls had surrounded me with safety when I had covid and cancer. These floors had patiently waited for the broom when I trailed in soil from the back porch or leaves from the front yard. I had spent hundreds, thousands of invoiced hours hunched over a computer in these spaces, typing, editing, meeting, meeting, meeting. And then there was our life together: the meals he made in the kitchen, the evenings on the couch in the living room, the laundry, the showering, the nights. “This was our first home,” he said as we stood in our empty bedroom, and I couldn’t keep from crying. This was our first home, said the tears making streaks in the dried sweat and dust on my cheeks. How can I leave this space to someone else?
But no. I did not leave that space as I feared I would. I did not abandon that place. There are few places I have. Instead, I gifted it. I gifted it as best as a renter can, in this world where we will increasingly own nothing and be the worse for it. I cared for it while it held me, and then, when it was time to go, I swept it clean[ii] and filled it with what I could leave: care, and thankfulness, and love.
There is deep within me, I think, the memory of the nomad, the one who knows leaving and arriving. I know how to count the distance that passes underneath me, how to select the tools and objects I need to carry, how to seek out kind ground to ease myself down onto and create home, however impermanent, in that place. I have forgotten how to watch the seasons and I am out of practice and out of my depth when it comes to cultivating the kind of relationships my ancestors had, and yet, there is something in me that knows this pattern of building belonging.[iii]
Maybe this is why my keyring is heavy. Somewhere deep in me is the need to be memory, to be connection. Not to long for the flesh pots of Egypt, but to remember how we lived while we were there. To know to welcome the stranger, because I remember we were strangers in a strange land. To give food and water, because I have been thirsty and hungry. To tend to the sick, because I have been sick. To give clothing and shelter, to visit the prisoner, because others have held for me and shared with me the memory, the reality, of what it is like to lack these things: clothes, home, freedom, dignity. To care for a space, because I know in my bones the need for connection, belonging, trust, and love. Each interlocking ring of keys holds my ebenezers of the past, a testament to who I long to be now.
We are between things in this moment, living in three free-flowing rooms and a kitchen while we wait for a parsonage, Ian starting a new role while I look for one. The keys to our storage unit sit vibrant and waiting as we learn this place and these people, seeking out spaces of mutual care. I have so much.[iv] I am accustomed to more. I do not take that indictment lightly. I hear the Savior’s call to a life different from the one I live, one deeper in the struggle and lighter in possessions.
But still, I unpack. Still I cultivate blooms on growing things in pots and vases. Still I set out candles and photos, still I place the needle on a well-loved record,[v] still I walk from room to room saying, Thank you. Still my keyring swings, awkwardly, with the weight of places I do not live anymore. There is somehow, still, the quiet, practical holiness of the vacuum and the dust cloth. Somehow, still the burden of care.
May I find and earn in this place the trust that I need to belong again.
[i] I won’t say which brand, and I won’t say if it’s still true, but once upon a time my dad gifted me this key because it was universal, and I delight in the chaotic dadness of this gift. When the apocalypse comes, I will reign with vicious joy over every golf course and gated community because my father gave me the keys to (the primary mode of transportation in) the kingdom.
[ii] Luke 11:24-26, but full disclosure: we actually hired a cleaning service to come behind us after we moved. I am not ashamed of that decision. It just doesn’t go with the metaphor.
[iii] There is something in me, too, that knows how to charge into a new space, to bluster and blunder into a community, to demand, to take, to harm, to claim people and land and nature that aren’t mine. There is a part of me that knows how to look away when others do this, to ignore or excuse or bless. I see this. I own this. I am learning what to do with this.
[iv] The Palestinian tradition of keeping house keys weighs heavy on me as I write this, as does the story of District Six in Cape Town, ZA, where the photo for this piece comes from. It is a gift to be able to migrate by choice and safely in this world, and I am furious that it is a gift when we should be guaranteeing it as a right.
[v] This line is mostly here to point out the sheer absurdity I engaged in by keeping a record player and a box of records out of storage when moving across six states in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Twenty-Four. They are heavy things to move twice.