Memories of Air

This is one of my favorite childhood photos.

My grandmother Margaret is in the foreground. I'm flying a kite on the beaches of Calpe, Spain, near Alicante. We spent summers and a few Easter breaks in the warm Spanish sunshine when we lived in Belgium (which is filled with as much rain and as many rhododendrons as Washington). Wow, sounds like the life, eh. When I tell my traveling stories, I become envious. Wait, it was my life and I'm envious?

But remembering "some other grand time" is not why I like the photo. I like this photo because when I came across it in my grandmother’s album I had never seen it and -- it surprised me. I look so comfortable flying a kite. As if standing on the earth with my head tilted into the wide open air is the most comfortable thing in the world. I look at ease on terra firma, like I belong to the space around me - water, air, wind. That's what I love about it. I look so darn grounded – and I don't remember carrying that feeling with me.

The photo makes me remember that what I remember can be different then what also was….

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.

Diversity Under Cover

Rural Skagit Valley seems very white. It is very white.

And like yesterday, I'm often pleasantly surprised to uncover, by happenstance and casual conversation, the deep connections to the larger wider, less white, world.

I'm a prime example, walking around here looking like I fit in, me and my pale skin and my complex colored background (checkered past?) spending my formative years in countries much less white than this.

Yesterday, in a room filled with pale skinned people again, I uncover the hidden diversity. All seats taken, just a few on the squeezed against of the walls of the room are open. Skagit Valley Writer's League meeting. A woman squeezes in next to me. She is smiley and turns out as we chat to be Anne, gives me her card. I glance down at it quickly during the meeting. "Horticultural Professional & Therapeutic Gardener. Alizetti Gardens." I smile inwardly, that she likes plants, that I like her title, the possibilities it contains. I muse on the possibile actualities of "Therapeutic Gardening"  -- what she means by it versus all the things that could mean.

A lull in the meeting and I glance down again. In teeny less-than-6-point type at the very bottom of the card, I squint to read,"Alizetti: Swahilli for Sunflower from Kenya, East Africa - where our family took root..."

Initially I miss the comma after East Africa. It's the size of a dirt speck. Swahilli... hmmm. Not a common reference, really. During the meeting break that includes chocolate cake with plastic-y frosting that I do not eat, I ask, Why the Swahilli? A stint in Peace Corps in Kenya, and then she meets her husband so they stay a few more years after that totalling seven. Again, I smile and get excited. Kenyan husband, I wonder? Awesome. She explains, second generation white Kenyan. She describes his heritage as "colonial." I call him TCK.

We connect more. I mention, likely in a low mumble she doesn't catch, that I'd love to meet him, that I'm a TCK too. I don't think she heard me. As usual these days, I downplay this part of me. Though it always lives, in shimmering excitment at the news of someone else maybe a bit like me, in this part of the world.

[photo credit: Alizeti's flickr photostream]

Questions Big and Small, Mostly for the Sake of Asking

On seeing the movie The King's Speech: Is writer's block an unspoken stutter? The pressure of the blank page, pressure of facing "the audience." The drive for perfection -- and under it all, the fear of underperfoming -- that can lead to spoken or written hesitation. Vocal or paginated blanks.

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.

No Longer Spineless

Following a decade of publication in magazine journals and newsprint-style formats, behold: The Spine.

If you're interested in cross-cultural conversations, you can find The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays in all the usual places books are sold: the big A, B&N or your friendly local bookstore, as well as in downloadable formats for Kindle and Nook. Or put in a request at your local libary to purchase a copy for loan. And let me know if they do as I'd be honored. Our libraries are amazing.

Among the 20 diverse essays on sociocultural topics, you will find my essay on the experience of growing up overseas from zero to 18 years old, and then "coming home" to the U.S.: "Fragments--Finding Center".

Strange how different a book feels, being published in one. I tend towards essay writing, and love all good writing regardless of book or magazine. So I'm suprised at the difference suddenly how much more permanent a spine feels.

It means I can be in libraries. It means I can take a place among people's bookshelves at home. It's a sweet spot.

My Old Friend, U.S. Highway 2

You know those rare moments when you realize what a good friend you've had standing quietly beside you through the years? Today, I drove a two-lane highway for the umpth time -- through the corridor of trees, alongside the emerald Skykomish River, next to metal train cars chugging alongside, up up up to Stevens Pass. And I realized: Highway 2 and I have a long sweet history.

Today, a clear winter road took us up to Stevens Pass for Noah's Sunday ski lesson. A rare treat to spend two hours in the car, just my little buddy and me. Sure, he was tired. Sure, I was tired. 6:30 am, an early morning up and out of the house. A long drive ahead. I ignore an impulse to offer him an iPhone or Leapster game. I drive in the quiet and occasionally adjust my rear view mirror to study his face. Much of the ride, his eyes are relaxed -- lids heavy but open, his relaxed face turned to the window.

How many times have I whizzed along this road, watched the same scenery he was taking in? Today, we pass by gray-brown trees, haloed by the gray-white light of midwinter, covered in a thick moss like fur. Limbs stretch across the road like arms in slow motion. Together, my son and I fly through this tunnel of time.

Highway 2 was a frequent road to adventures in my early twenties. My then-boyfriend Brad and I would pack up for the day, sometimes without a plan, for a hike or to explore a town or to picnic or all the above. Sultan. Startup. Skykomish. Goldbar. I loved the sounds of these towns, the way you could still feel their roots out of nothingness, settlements borne out of some bold people making their way through these mountains as miners or loggers or prospectors.

The great Northwest lay at my feet, too. Both Brad and I were new to the area and hungry for its thick trees, its rivers, its mountains. That we could pass a car loaded with skis, then a car strapped down with a kayak, and another topped by a mountain bike, and us with our leather hiking boots itching for a trail... it felt exhilarating as hell to live here. It felt new and limitless.

It wasn't just a new city for me, or a new state. Living in this corner of the U.S. - it was an entirely new country for me. And man alive was it amazing. To be on my own, at the start of my adult life, discovering the beauty of great outdoors. Discovering who I was, in the context of America. Sure, I'd visited the Northwest - but under the wings of my parents, always as a child. Now I was in charge of the discoveries, and it was exhilarating. Highway 2. Curves of road lined with soft bristle of evergreen tree - and then around one corner, POW! A fist of snow-covered granite, Mount Index, hits you in the face.

Twenty years later, Highway 2 is an old friend, one that I'm still hanging out with, still new having adventures. Today, I'm with my six-year-old son. And every time I round that curve, the one that flings your car by that stretch of river that sits still and deep turquoise, your car so close you can almost imagine you are a bird swooping over the smooth boulders holding the pool wide, so close you have to inhale sharply every time, smile softly as you turn your head out the window to take in as much of the turquoise as you can, and you have to say to whoever is in the car with you this time, "Look at that! Oh man, is that beautiful. Look at that color." Every time. To my then-boyfriend or my husband or my good friend or my son or my mother -- whoever is on the adventure today. And if I'm by myself, just me and the road, you can bet I think the exact same thought.

Here's to old friends, you and me, Highway 2.