Haunting the Customs Line

"Ow, Mom, that hurts!" Noah says to me, after his first swipe with third-world toilet paper.

We're on our first international family vacation. Isla Mujeres, Mexico. He's five years old. Okay, we'd all been out of the country before that but sorry, Canada, you don't count.

My first steps off the airplane, into the tube walkway, and then Wham! It smells of my childhood. It smells like home. That wet musty air hiding underneath the scent of machine-cooled air. An overworked A/C system. Leaky windows. Who knows what it is. I had to spend a minute sniffing it to figure it out. The smell of humidity. The smell of imperfection. The smell of a third-world HVAC system.

American air conditioning smells, well, perfect seems like an odd way to describe it. Clinically clean is more like it. You can't smell wetness, age, and a certain thickness. American HVAC air has no personality, no oomph. Here I was, sniffing stinky canned air and feeling quite happy about it. It meant I was overseas again.

The last time I was overseas in 2005 -- five months in India with my husband -- feels like -- decades ago, xx,xxx leagues under the sea away from who I am now. I am a mama. I now exist in an entirely new dimension, one that I never even knew existed. And I am now traveling overseas for the first time as a mother. Two kids in tow.

I stand in line, holding four dark blue passports now. Not my usual, solitary, One. The customs line winds around the poles. Katherine thrashes at my feet and makes a break into the crowd, too many hours on a plane for a one year old. Noah wants to be held, tired, heavy for a five year old. The whining, begging, chasing, thrashing sets in.

I am desperate for calm. To be left alone, really. I dig out the kingsize Blow Pop from my purse, it's been in emergency stash for a few months now. Sticky pink saliva immediately stains the front of Katherine's shirt. And she refuses to remove the sugarbomb from her mouth now that she's had a taste. She shrieks when I try to pull it away. Okay, I'm only slightly mortified. Because it works.

The sticky Blow Pop affords a few minutes of calm in the line (once I stop trying to rip it from Sticky      Paws' hands). I look around. I find myself looking into faces, wondering. I am looking for myself. that girl I knew. The one who stood in customs lines at the foot of her mommy and daddy, two, three, four times a year. That girl who never thought twice about standing in customs lines. It's just the way it was -- to get home, to leave home, to go most anywhere.

I want to find her in someone else's face. I want to recognize myself. Remember myself. This girl feels far far away from me. I want to find her, so that I can be sure she actually was a part of me. Is a part of me. More and more, I hardly believe I was her.

We're next. Hand over the four passports. It's my name on the customs form as Head of Family now. Hola. Small smile, make eye contact. Small nod. These are the people giving me passage to another country. They are the final gateway and I always take this moment seriously, and with a slight smile.

Passports flip open to the picture. A glance up from photo to actual face. Check. Boom! Stamp, stamp. The mechanical bang of stamps echoes down the line of customs desks, those square hard boxes each with filled with boxed unsmiling men. Travellers flow in one by one. Leaving home. Coming home.

I look at my Mexico entrance stamp, first one in my new passport. I've had a passport since I was six days old. And I wonder -- when will I come home? After forty years, here I am, still looking for myself in a customs line.

Family, From Afar

How is it that my family looks morebeautiful from afar?

I am running the lake, feet pounding the gravel, breath pounding from lungs with each thud, and I see them -- standing on the concrete dock, like an island, a pedastal, holding them like art, no sound of them. Ken. Noah. Katherine's canary yellow stroller. Bright against the green trees, the gray sky, the smooth silver water. Framed. Still life. I slow down, hear only my breath. I want to stop running, to grin, satisfied, to linger, to take them in, like a painting I want to stop and gaze at for a long time, no sound of them, just my eyes soaking them in as art, no words, my heart gasping now, how beautiful they look from this distance, three beings somehow one solid sculpture of family, my family. Oh, my heart.

I didn't want to admit this - how much more I can see the beauty now, then up close, when I am mostly myopic and feeding and wiping and bossing.

And today I come across a quote I saved a few long months ago from the back of The Sun - and I feel better to know - why - they looked so beautiful in that moment on the dock, far away, no sound.

"If you see the whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Thank goodness for moments from afar; those tiny glimpses of the whole.

Lionhead: Water Earth Fire

"I just love how I can hear Lionhead at night," my cousin Laura says to my mother.

"I know," she replies, "isn't it nice? I can hear the creek too."

I butt in. "What? What do you mean, 'You can hear Lionhead.'?"

Laura turns her head to me from her chair on th sandy white beach. My toes dig in to the cool sand of the evening. "I can hear Lionhead Creek rushing at night. When it's all quiet and everyone's gone to sleep."

Laura's head turns to look up the lake and farther, up to the distant mountain that peeks between the purple hills above the shore. Lionhead. The "Mountain" part goes unsaid. Its shaggy rock-striped face goes without saying. It needs no introduction as a mountain.

Funny thing is, I wake up tonight at 3:39 am, have to pee, leave both kids in the camper a bit unsurely - I keep looking back at Katherine as I stand at the door of the camper, my hand on the knob, turning slowly, that screen door that no matter how slowly you open it releases with a loud Clack.

Turn, turn, slowly, looking back. She often wakes up within a minute or two of my body absent from her side - and now she's in the upper bunk alone -- Clack -- She scootches like an earthworm, wriggling, face scrunching. Her body releases and she lets out a wheeze like a sigh. I slide out the camper door.

And there it is. In the quiet, now that everyone's asleep, I hear it. Unmistakable. A roar like the black whooshing of the universe, sliding down that mountain, rushing past the pelt of trees, skimming the air above the water to fill my ears like a shell with the volume turned up to 10.

How could I never have heard this sound before? Lionhead Creek in the darkness. Whooshing down Lionhead Mountain. The head waters that carried the ashes of my ancestors. Grandma Bessie and Grandpa John.