JENNA LANG

It hits home when we are at the meat section.  There is only one package of chicken left.  Mom delicately picks it up and holds it out to me; I place it in the cart between bulk packs of macaroni & cheese and bleach.  We look at the now-empty refrigerator cases and the pictures on the news of empty grocery stores become our reality.  It’s early in the pandemic.  In the photos I take that day, we are not even wearing masks.  In one, Mom smiles as the winner of the final chicken.  In another, taken in the shelf-stable carbs aisle which only contains a single, ripped open bag of white rice, her eyes look unsettled.

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That first period is marked by sanitization.  Sanitize the groceries, sanitize the mail, sanitize your shoes when you come into the house.  My hands are raw, but Purell keeps us safe.  As long as we are careful, the virus remains outside our white picket fence.  

 

When Mom receives an email that she is no longer an occupational therapist but is now a front-line worker in the newly-built Boston Hope Medical Center, the gaps in our fence become frighteningly wide.  We dedicate the basement “the Covid area.”  It has a bathroom and a separate entrance.  The shelves hold board games stacked precariously, the cabinets store extra cereal and granola bars, and the walls are filled with artwork from a decade of childhood.  This is where my mom showers immediately after coming home and stores everything she brings into the house.  My parents explain to my sister and me that the basement is also where any of us who get sick will isolate.  Thankfully, the space has not been needed for that. 

 

Of course, the fact that none of us have gotten sick is not entirely our doing.  Even with the most careful precautions, the virus is not deterred by any gate or door.  My feeling of security at the end of each day when Mom comes upstairs and pulls the basement door closed behind her is a suspension of reality.  The gap between the bottom of the door and the floor is wide enough for 19 million viral particles to slip through undetected at once.  Mental escapes of the world’s danger, such as mine, are allowed only when you are on the safe side of statistics, luck, and circumstance. 

 

Covid-19 is not the only force that shattered the safety of homes this past year.  Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Kentucky apartment; a large piece of a plane engine fell into a Colorado couple’s front yard; and thousands living in California, Oregon, and Washington lost their homes to wildfires.  In any year, homes are threatened by domestic violence, food insecurity, family conflicts, and situations that insurance companies call “acts of God.”  The gap between the door and the floor can never be tight enough. 

 

It is a blessing that many of us are able to pretend we are safe at home, hunkering down until the virus goes away.  We develop feelings of secure harborage behind those special four walls despite knowing their fragility.  When needed, we raise our hands to hold the walls up for each other, making sure those we love are sheltered. 

 

When Saket Mishra moved from Boston to Napa Valley, he and his boyfriend fit all of their belongings – mostly clothing and kitchen tools – into suitcases. “I’m a one-pot-cook kind of a person so it’s interesting that, for me, the things that I moved were kitchen tools.  But in Indian cooking, it’s not just a knife and pan.  Sometimes you have to have a grater, you have to have a mincer; there are special tools for certain things.  I think I carried a lot of those specialty items because my parents brought them every time they came from India so acquiring them again would be difficult.  But for anything that I could replace locally, I went here to a Habitat, to a Boomerang, to a Goodwill, and I just bought pans and other things.  You wouldn’t believe it, but we moved in six bags.” 

 

Port Blair, Calcutta, Vizag, Cochin, Mumbai, Dubai, Bangalore, Mumbai again, South End, Roslindale, Napa Valley.  Mishra has lived in many places.  His father was in the Indian Navy, and the family moved between gated military communities every 5 years throughout most of his childhood.  These communities contained their own schools, hospitals, grocery stores, movie theaters, and clubs.  He was always proud when civilians would attend the parties.  “We lived with the idea that ‘oh my god we live in this amazing place where everybody wants to live.’”  The houses were large, often with many more bedrooms than were needed for two parents and two children.  His mother, “a homemaker,” would open their doors to anyone who needed a place to stay while waiting for their housing assignment.  This type of living arrangement was common in India’s military housing.  People would move in and out too often to care about the furniture being damaged from the bumps and scratches of everyday life.  It typically was not even theirs to own. 

 

Mishra fondly remembers a feeling of community built through open doors.  His move to California is a step towards recreating such a shared space.  He wants to make his farm more than a place to grow vegetables.  “I want to set up a commune where people can come in and work on projects with me.  We could have food together – they could cook, I could cook.  And that’s what I like.  For me, the concept of home was never private and personal, and it was never as hard bound as, ‘Oh, I’m gonna call 911 if someone steps in.’  It’s never that.”  Although he moved right before Covid-19, Mishra has already partnered with local landscaping companies; his farm is a place for them to freely dispose of their woodchips that will decay to improve his soil.  The nearby antique store will display historical farming machines next to his driveway, where a row of food trucks will turn fresh vegetables into a variety of cuisines. 

 

During the past year, he started to farm his land.  He mulched half an acre and put in 500 plants.  First were trees, and this winter he started growing vegetables.  “I did my cabbage, my kale, my lettuce.  I got mixed results because the soil is gray and the water is sparse, but I wanted to see how the growing is going to be.” 

 

For the first time, he is seeing the farm as a place to settle in.  It did not happen immediately.  “I don’t think we nested in this house up until 3 months back.  Until then, we both kept thinking, ‘Oh, is this going to be permanent? Is this our final house?’  Covid happened, and everything was shut around us, so we didn’t connect with anybody and we didn’t spend on anything long term, like a full bed or a couch or anything like that that is hard to get rid of.  We did the bare minimum so that it looks and feels livable.”  But after a year, things are starting to change.  “Now, I think we are kind of feeling at home.  The things that I invest in are not just the small little plants but also maybe a $500 machine because it makes my job easier.”  He is currently building a hydroponic system so the deer will not eat his peppers and tomatoes. 

 

Someday, he wants to add his own food truck at the end of the row. 

 

One Thanksgiving, my Nana entertains my sister and me by helping us make decorations for the dining room.  First, we draw a giant Mayflower boat on a sheet of poster paper.  We cut out each family member’s face from photos and tape them on the top deck and in the portholes of the boat.  Then, we fold index cards in half to make a place card for each person.  We decorate them with turkey stickers and drawings of our favorite things.  I draw a bowl of mashed potatoes on mine, and my sister draws a stick of butter on hers.  We split the cards into adults and kids for the two tables and make sure our favorite cousins would sit next to us. 

 

Over the years, the names on the place cards change.  As people die or divorce out of the family, their name cards are left in the bag.  As new people marry in or guests come for a year, their names are written on the reverse sides of the retired cards.  The legibility of the handwriting shows how long each person has been a part of family Thanksgivings.  We still divide into kid and adult tables, although the kids table now includes everyone under 34.   

 

The poster of the Mayflower hangs every year, unchanged by the passage of time.  While waiting for the turkey to rest, we laugh at the inclusion of my cousin’s college friend who joined our table for only that year.  We pretend not to notice the uncles who have left the family through messy divorces, and we remember those who are no longer with us, especially Nana.  Thanksgiving was always her holiday. 

 

Eli Baden-Lasar has one sister but did not know he had half-siblings until he was 19.  Then, he went searching and found all 32 of them. 

 

Baden-Lasar has two mothers and was conceived with a sperm donor.  He has always had a copy of the informational form his donor filled out to be passed on to the families of the children he would help to create.  In 2019, Baden-Lasar told his story in the New York Times.  “I remember carrying the form with me in my backpack, taking it to school and studying it occasionally when I remembered I had it. There was this sense of touch – this person had used his hand to answer these questions; I could see where he had crossed things out.”  Baden-Lasar only knows his father through this sheet of paper with a donor number at the top. 

 

He is not the only young adult whose paper bears that number.  When he signs up for California Cryobank’s sibling registry, a message board shows “about a dozen cryptic usernames of various mothers or children who were perhaps hesitant to reveal themselves completely.”  One of the usernames is familiar – it contains the last name of a friend from a summer program Baden-Lasar attended years ago.  Lamb, meaning “gentle-hearted.” 

 

Sure enough, Gus Lamb is his half-sibling.  Finding out he knew a sibling is “a moment of glee but also of horror. I knew that as a story it was mind-blowing, but it was also disturbing – to have the script switched, to go from friends to brothers.”  They read each other’s personal essays during the program and slept on the same floor of a dorm, but they never suspected they were half-brothers.  Theirs was not a Parent Trap case of long-lost family members discovering their relations because of an uncanny feeling of familiarity.  “There had been no instant connection or unbreakable bond, and we easily lost touch when the program ended.” 

 

His friend, now also his half-brother, adds Baden-Lasar to a group chat with most of his other half-siblings.  Baden-Lasar begins to reach out and meet this group of people spread across the U.S.  He brings his camera with him to photograph those he shares half his genes with.  “Looking through the camera, I had a feeling I couldn’t shake: that these people were all versions of me, just formed in different parts of the country — but were also strangers who might as well have been picked out of a hat.”  To better understand his half-siblings in the limited time he spent with each one, he photographs them in the places where they grew up. 

 

Most of them are in their late teens and early twenties, just beginning to separate their own identities from how they were raised to be.  “There are some things about a person you can’t understand without seeing the place where they grew up. It’s a type of access and point of view that allows you to see someone in a very vulnerable state: This was their given life, messiness and all, not necessarily the life they want to build for themselves.”  Many of the meetings turn quickly from introductions to deep conversations.  There is a connection of trust between the half-siblings, but no need to impress one another and no expectations of a further relationship.   The discussions are gentle.  But every once in a while, there would be a similarity between a pair that was a little too eerie.  Maybe a facial expression or a laugh.  These moments of looking in the genetic mirror “completely scramble” Baden-Lasar’s sense of self. 

 

He had a childhood, and has a whole life separate from the 32 people he now knows as his half-siblings.  He has two loving parents who were so focused on building a family that they never stopped to think about the larger web of connections their children would be joining because of the way they were brought into the world. 

 

I finish my biology final and call home to let my parents know I am done with sophomore year.  My dad had texted me during the test asking to let him know when I was officially on summer vacation.  When he picks up the phone, he asks me where I am.  “I’m walking back to Kirkland now.  My friends are going to take our dinner outside and have a picnic!”  As I answer the question, I realize that he does not normally ask where I am during our phone calls.  I decide against telling him how the exam went and wait for him to tell me what he is on the phone to say.  “Bobby got hit by a car this morning.”  Every neuron in my brain fires at once and keeps firing, as if to block any more information from reaching me. 

 

I know Dad must have immediately told me that she was still alive, but it does not sink in.  After a few pounding heartbeats, adrenaline kicks in enough to turn my ears back on.  “The landscaping company that trimmed Shirley’s trees yesterday didn’t put the rocks back under the gate.  She must have seen a squirrel or another dog, and she dug her way out.”  When she was a small puppy, we piled rocks along the whole fence connecting our yard and our next-door neighbor’s for just this reason.  We planned to remove them when she grew large enough to not slip out, but she never made it past 14 pounds.  Apparently her Jack Russell was mixed with more than a little Chihuahua.  “She ended up on Washington St. and was hit by a pickup truck.  Luckily the woman who saw it happen recognized her and told the driver where we lived.  We were sitting on the deck when I heard the gate open and saw a woman cradling a bloody towel as she walked into our yard.” 

 

“Mom and I drove her right to the emergency room at Angell.  She was shaking the whole way.  We gave the vets our credit card and they warned us to expect a big charge.”  When a dog and a pickup truck collide, the internal damage happens to the dog.  “Syd had to go onstage not knowing any more than that.”  My sister.  She is in community theater production of Fiddler on a Roof happening this weekend.  Luckily, the show’s plot is a sad one, but she had to perform not knowing whether Bobby was ok until after.  “Because you didn’t already know, I made everyone promise not to tell you until your exam was over.” 

 

I am finally able to speak.  “Is she at home?”  “She will be soon.  By some miracle, she has no broken bones or internal bleeding.  Only some stitches on her face.”  I move home for the summer the next day, and I sit next to her curled up in her little circle dog bed.  She is still loopy from the vet’s drugs and scared from the previous day’s adventure.  I tell her about what was on my biology test, and my voice seems to calm her. 

 

My Dad’s early memories of home are his parents’ divorce.  There is fighting, and then he moves with his mother, brother, and sister into a small townhouse apartment.  He spends time with his father on the weekends.  On the way to his father’s place or to a fun activity, they stop at KFC for a bucket of fried chicken.  But most of the time, Dad is with his mother.  Two years later, my Noni remarries to a man with two daughters.  This creates a household of 7, but to my Dad, “it never felt like a comfortable home.”  There is always some issue or other.  The two sets of siblings do not get along, Noni has problems with alcohol, and Dad’s stepfather cooks meat the way only he and his daughters will eat it.  “Rare, bloody rare.”  In 22 years, I have never seen Dad eat anything less than medium.  Usually medium-well. 

 

That apartment is a place where he never knows what he will walk into upon opening the door.  “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m dying to go home because I had a long day.’  It was always like, ‘I had a long day, and now I don’t know what I am going home to.’  There were a lot of times when I would go home and then leave.  I was like, ‘alright, they’re fighting’ or whatever, and I was just like ‘I’m going out.’” 

 

My Mom’s childhood home is very different.  “It was a stable, routine kind of place.  Everybody was there; we had dinner at 5 o’clock.  It was a very predictable place.”  Apparently, even my Grandfather’s shirt never changes.  “He’d come home from work, take off his work shirt and there’d be his white t-shirt.  Every day.”  Mom loves routines, so I see the appeal for her. 

 

The stability of my Mom’s childhood in Mission Hill does not mean life was always easy.  When she turns 11, she excitedly leaves her under-the-under-the-table job delivering flyers for a regular under-the-table job in the kitchen of a nursing home.  Her cousin works at the same place and one day singes off both her eyebrows.  But even a below-minimum wage job is worth keeping. 

 

When they get engaged, my parents move into the second floor of a white triple-decker in Mission Hill, just around the corner from where Mom grew up.  This is where I would live until age 12. 

 

My block, and the few blocks surrounding us, make up a co-op.  Residents are expected to be participants in neighborhood events and volunteer when needed.  The co-op is not a place to live while in grad school or working a job nearby for a year or two.  This is a place to build a community.  When my parents want to move into the neighborhood, my Mom is still living with her family, so the apartment is to go under Dad’s name.  However, there is a long waitlist for units, and Dad would have been put on the bottom. 

 

Nana runs the membership selection committee that has to approve anyone moving in.  My Dad has to formally petition to his future mother-and-law and all of her friends why he should be allowed to move to the top of the list and get the vacant apartment.  “We actually kind of broke the rules a little.  Because technically, priority was a family member.  So Mom could have gotten it, but she wasn’t moving in with me yet.  I was getting it as a soon-to-be family member.  I wasn’t technically family yet.  Nana fudged the rules and let me in.”  Luckily, Nana likes him. 

 

To my Mom, this apartment means that she can be near her original family and her future family.  Although her father dies before my sister and I were born, Nana is a third (much cooler) parent who takes care of us two days a week while my parents work.  To Dad, the Mission Hill apartment is the first place he feels settled in.  “Going home there was viewed as totally gonna be good.  Like there were no issues.  No matter how bad it was, I could always go home, and it would be fine.  Growing up, I didn’t have that at all, so it was different.” 

 

One Christmas, our neighbor with the old dog named Bambi gives my family a small red gumball machine.  It is a strange gift.  No one really likes gumballs so why would I want a gumball machine in my house?  After making sure my sister and I respectfully thank her for the gift, our parents make some improvements.  Dad fixes it so we don’t have to put a quarter in to turn the handle, and Mom switches out the gumballs for a big bag of M&Ms. 

 

They quickly set some ground rules.  Everyone gets 1 spin of the M&M machine each day.  Unless only 1 M&M comes out, in which case you may take a second spin.  On your birthday, you get 2 spins.  For some reason that none of us can remember, whenever my sister’s friend Kelsey comes over you also get 2 spins.  After a vacation, you count the number of days you missed your spin and take them all at once on the day you get back.  Unfortunately, going to college does not count as a vacation, so those spins are lost. 

 

One of the neighbors who would babysit us takes dozens of spins after she thinks my sister and I are asleep.  Maybe we are asleep at first, but to us, the sound of M&Ms careening down the metal spiral is a ringing dinner bell.  We rat her out to Mom and Dad the next morning, but they tell us that Maureen has an exception to the rules.  They do not offer any further explanation. 

 

Over time, having your spin becomes an event.  It often is done upon returning home after leaving the house.  When we all go out somewhere together, we come home and file in a row right to the kitchen counter to line up for our spin.  Other times, it is a fun homework break or small snack if dinner is far away.  If the house feels a little quiet, you can yell “I’m having my spin!” and everyone else will shout back “woohoo!” or something of the like from wherever they are.  Sometimes, there is a lucky parental announcement of “Two Spin Day!”  It can happen at any time, but seems to often coincide with particularly good or bad days.  At some point a few years ago, Dad started taking his spin and giving away his M&Ms, usually to Mom.  But sometimes, if I am sitting at the table studying and it’s going to be a long night, I look up and he’ll give them to me. 

 

David Haig left Australia at age 32 to go to England for a post-doctoral program.  “I had no intention not of returning home.  After 2 years I was ready to move back, I had a job interview at Australia National University.  It was quite organized; we were just negotiating how I would go there.”  He enjoyed his time at Oxford, but the “wonderful, lush green countryside of England” did not compare to the mix of brown, green, and gray foliage that makes up the Australian landscape. 

 

His well-laid plans did not last long.  “And then, I got a phone call saying I got a fellowship at Harvard.”  A fellowship turned into a faculty position, which turned into a tenure position, and he has been at Harvard ever since.  He is now a leading researcher with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, which includes a prime lab location next to the emu exhibit in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History.  The emu is the largest bird endemic to Australia; the birds are flightless but can run over 30 mph.  Of course, the emus next to his office are taxidermied.  They are not going anywhere. 

 

Haig did not know at the time that his decision to go to England would be the end of his time in Australia.  But as of next year, he will have spent more time living outside of Australia than inside.  He is not the only member of his family to relocate across the world; his wife is from Brazil.  They met at Oxford and then moved to the United States together.  This means that the place where they work and raised their family does not have the feeling of a lifelong home for either of them. 

 

Haig studies human genetics and ancestry.  For most of human history, these topics were one and the same.  The genes we had were the culture we were born, lived, and died in.  Now, it is common to live somewhere other than where your ancestors were or where your descendants will be.  “Very few of us are going to live out our lives in the place where we were born.  I think this has consequences for how much people are prepared to invest in the beauty of their surroundings.  You know, our children are not necessarily going to be here.  If you think about Geneva, all the cathedrals, when they were being built, the people who were building them had a fair chance that their children and their grandchildren would be here in the city and enjoying what they were doing.”  In a time when an Australian and a Brazilian meet in England and raise children in the United States, “that’s changing.” 

 

Haig cannot build a grand cathedral for his children, nor watch them learn to love the smell of eucalyptus leaves.  When Australia National University offered him another job, his wife and kids vetoed the option to move.  For them, home was elsewhere.  Years later, home is not the Australia of Haig’s childhood.  “Now, when I go back it’s changed so much in thirty years.  I don’t have any family living there anymore so it’s ceasing to feel like home.  And now, when I fly into Logan Airport and catch the taxi, and I’m coming up the Charles river on Storrow drive, I feel like I’m coming home.”  

 

Our layover is delayed, and we hit some turbulence, so the passengers take a collective sigh of relief when we hear the captain announce we are finally approaching our landing at Boston Logan International Airport.  The lights out my window grow less and less distant until we pass over the harbor islands and then the wheels hit the runway.  The moment of landing is both my favorite and least favorite part of a flight.  The instant of touchdown and the following seconds spent tearing down the runway until the plane slows is the time when you find out whether you just took another safe flight or if the landing gear will fail and you are about to burst into flames before you even realize what is going on. 

 

My heartrate slows along with the plane’s wheels, and we taxi into Terminal C. 

 

I turn on my phone and hope that the battery didn’t drain during the flight.  Dad is supposed to meet me in baggage claim.  I know he will be tracking the plane from the car, so he’ll know which carousel to go to, but I want to text him that we safely landed anyway.  It would be sad to not spend the time waiting for the rows ahead of me to deboard texting someone to let them know that I am safe and I am here. 

 

My text doesn’t go through, so I try resending it as we walk up the gangplank towards customs.  At first I think my phone might be broken again, but then I see that most of my friends are doing the same.  It seems like none of us had service on the runway.  One of the customs officials stops handing out the little declaration cards to yell at us.  “Pudyah cellphones down!  Don touch‘em untilyuh through cusdims.” 

 

I’m annoyed by her shouts to put my phone away, but in a familiar way.  I slip it into my pocket as I have dozens of times before as my teachers’ voices bellow through the school hallways.  In France, if someone was bothered by our group of high schoolers they threw us dirty glances, but they did not say anything.  It was unnerving to never quite know how wrong our actions were.  I felt judged in ways I could not understand. 

 

This woman could be an aunt or neighbor.  I know she is tired at the end of what was probably a long day, and she was yelling at us only because it was some little thing she could control.  She does not really care about us using our phones.  So once she sees that it’s in my pocket, I smile at her and unzip my jacket so she can see from my high school t-shirt that I was flying home, not starting my vacation. 

 

She doesn’t smile back, but her frown softens, and she reaches for the large Dunks, regulah, that she has balanced on the windowsill next to her even though it’s almost midnight. 

 

I am glad she takes a long swig of the iced coffee with cream and sugar.  She doesn’t know it yet, but she will soon face a large group of French middle schoolers coming from the plane behind us.  They are wearing fancy clothes, took up more than their fair share of the overhead luggage compartment, and definitely have the latest cellphones.  I know they are not prepared for the welcome they are about to receive.  But I do not feel bad for them.  On the plane, I wanted to yell at them, too. 

 

I’ve never heard Dad use the term “good mojo” until he and my mom tell me the story of buying our house.  From the first day Mom drove by it on her way to look at another house, our little blue cape had good mojo. 

 

“What I remember is Mom calling me, and she got all kind of ‘I don’t know what do to,’ and I said ‘go talk to the guy’ or something like that.  Mom was on her way to another house in Roslindale and I was at work when she drove past here and saw the sign that said, ‘Open House.’  It hadn’t been put on the market officially.” At this point, the house is half blue, but it is on its way to becoming the shade of colonial blue that is Nana’s blue.  Two months earlier, we buried her in a casket of the same color.  Throughout our childhoods, my sister and I believed her favorite color was blue.  Years later, Mom tells us that I had for some reason designated blue as her color when I was very little, perhaps because her car was blue.  She never corrected me throughout years of making every birthday card and beaded necklace blue.  As it turns out, her actual favorite color was green, the color that now hides under the blue vinyl siding. 

 

The day after Mom first saw the house, my parents drive from Mission Hill to Roslindale to meet the couple who had bought it to fix up and resell.  “It was really quick.  It was like a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and they were having an open house that weekend, that Saturday.  And at an open house, other people can put offers in.  So we stood outside and talked about it.  If we didn’t put an offer in and convince them to take it before Saturday, anyone could.  So we put an offer in.” 

 

Mom talks to one of the owners.  She is “fresh off the boat from Ireland” and so, of course, she knew Betty Smith.  The same Betty Smith who baked peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses on top when Nana would take my sister and I to visit.  The same Betty Smith who ran neighborhood Bingo nights.  One time, when Bingo got particularly rowdy, she sang out a song of congratulations when Father Kelly, the priest who married my parents, got Bingo.  It was such an event that Dad claims the song will be etched in his heart forever. 

 

As Mom finds out that the owner and Betty Smith lived a few houses away from each other, Dad speaks with the other owner.  He explains to my Dad how he still has to hang a bunch of the doors.  He asks would be alright, if my parents buy the house, for him to take a few extra days and make sure that if anything was not right, he will have time to adjust it.  Dad tells the owner about his grandfather, who had been a house-builder, cabinet-maker, and hotel bar-builder.  “I tell him, ‘You remind me of my grandfather because that’s how he was.  Kind of a perfectionist with that kind of stuff because he wanted to make sure it was right.’  It was nice.  It was a connection.” 

 

A few days later, the owners accept my parents offer.  They hold the open house anyway, but do not take any other bids because as long as everything qualifies, they are ready to sell my parents their first home.  After the open house, my parents walk outside and meet Shirley and Joe, our next-door neighbors.  Shirley is standing in her doorway with one hand on her hip, supervising over everything that was going on in the neighborhood.  It is a move my family calls “the Nana hip.”  Joe turns out to have the same first name, middle name, and birthday as my grandfather.  As Dad puts it, “Then we meet Shirley and Joe and realized they were Nana and Grandpa Joe.  So that’s weird.” 

 

“Between them, the owners, Betty Smith, and the house itself, it just seemed like the right house for us.  It had all kinds of good mojo.  We could just move in and start.” 

 

When I was growing up, I wanted to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.  I had a blue plaid dress, red slippers, and Nana cut two slits into in the sides of my hats to pull my Dorothy braids through.  One day, my parents bring home two fish.  I immediately name them Dorothy and Toto.  We call them goldfish, but they are actually just the feeder fish you can buy at the pet store for a couple of cents to feed your turtle.  Dad helps my sister and me spread the rainbow gravel at the bottom of their bowl, and we drop in a little shark statue.  The shark wears a bucket hat and holds a sign that said, “Gone Fishing.” 

 

Dorothy and Toto are full members of the family.  We celebrate their birthdays and give them tiny Christmas stockings just large enough for a container of fish food and a few Hershey’s kisses for their child caretakers.  I proudly explain to my teachers that because they are feeder fish that survived being scooped up by Petco workers until my family rescued them, they are very hardy fish.  Dorothy lives to be 5, and a year later Toto gets sick.  During his last week, I am afraid to go home from school and check his bowl in the kitchen.  When he begins to slowly bob up and down, positioned with his nose pointed up almost vertically, Dad rushes us to the pet store.  We try every fish medicine they have, but after a few days, he swims into the watery sunset to join Dorothy.  I am crushed.  That little feeder fish was supposed to live forever. 

 

When I come home for winter break after my first semester of college, we get to talking about the fish.  Dad has just adopted a “bullied fish” from a Facebook friend who has some aggressive fish in her tank, so once again there is a fishbowl on the kitchen table.  I remark that I am still shocked our two feeder fish lived for so many years. 

 

My parents look a bit confused and then crack up.  “What are you talking about?  We replaced those fish so many times!”  My sister and I look at each other, dumbfounded.  We had no idea. 

 

On the day that Walmart opens, Alison Frazee’s school dismisses classes early to celebrate.  Students in her school in small town Southern Virginia no longer have to drive an hour to get posterboard for a project.  An hour filled with driving by too many Confederate flags to count. 

 

Frazee’s daughter will never get out of class early to go to Walmart.  She lives in Boston.  She does not know her grandparents, who refuse to leave their comfort zone to visit this “rat-infested hellhole” of liberals.  She also does not know about Blackhead Signpost Road –named for black human heads balanced on fenceposts – that is on the way into Frazee’s hometown.   For Frazee, Massachusetts is the opposite of all her childhood problems. 

 

She moved up North when her fiancé started graduate school in Western Massachusetts.  Amherst was where Frazee first felt like people did not see her and automatically know her story.  “It was refreshing and a relief.  I could be and do and think and believe whatever I wanted.  Whatever I wanted without judgement.  I was anonymous.  I didn’t want to be defined, as an adult, only as the granddaughter of the furniture store owner.”  She intentionally lessened her Southern accent until it reached anonymous American. 

 

As her daughter gets older, Frazee and her husband will have to decide how much they want her to know of Frazee’s past.  It is a recurring thought.  “As a parent now, I have to make a lot of choices about how we want to raise our daughter.  You can’t separate that place in Virginia from that culture and that politics and that religion.  If she’s there, she’s gonna see the Confederate flag flying.  She’s gonna see pro-Trump, pro-conservative signs.  She’s gonna hear the n-word and things that I don’t want her to be exposed to.  I think about this all the time.”  It often comes up when families who Frazee’s family has befriended leave the city, which happens frequently.  “We’ve lost every friend we’ve made in Boston.  This city is expensive and a hard place to raise a kid.  When families have kids, they leave, and they usually go back home.  They go back to where their parents live, where they have a support network that can help them.  Going back home isn’t an option for us.” 

 

While she does not want to bring her daughter to Southern Virginia, and that is her determining reason to stay in Boston, Frazee does feel guilty about not returning to try and change things in her hometown.  “I feel like the only way to make real change is for people with a different mindset to go back and be vocal.  To say, ‘Look, your mindset and your policies are based in racism and you need to change them.’  Otherwise, they’re just within their own bubbles, you know.  They listen to their own news channels and share their own social media, and they don’t ever hear a different opinion.  And so sometimes I feel like the only way to change that is to actually go back and be that change.  But we just haven’t been able to do that because of our daughter.” 

 

Instead, Frazee works with the Boston Preservation Alliance to build a city of community for her family, a city where people care about their surroundings and make them worthy of preservation.  She hopes that her daughter will not have the same conflicted feelings about her hometown as she does.  “Home wasn’t a place that I was proud to be from.  We want her to be raised here, to be really from here.” 

 

The road is bumpy, and I am glad that Google Maps shows we are only 27 minutes away.  Any longer, and my Mom and I would both be carsick.  We are on our way to what is supposedly a hidden Thai food gem in the dense coastal forest of Rincón.  Dad turns the rental car onto a steep and windy road that looks like one of those driveways that you pass by and think “thank god I don’t live there in the winter.”  Tonight, the car is hot.  Even with all the windows rolled down, I am sweating.  When travel blogs told us not to go to Puerto Rico in August, we did not listen. 

 

As the sun dips below the mountains, it becomes more comfortable.  I pull my phone out of my pocket and start to write notes about what we did that day.  We usually forget to write in our family Travel Log, and I still want to remember something.  But the car is lurching back and forth with each bump in the road, and I have to put it down.  I glance up to Dad’s phone clipped to the dashboard and it says we are somehow 31 minutes away.  My sister looks up Ode to the Elephants on Yelp to confirm whether we have the correct address.  We seem to.  Dad reloads the map and it tells us to continue driving, so we do.  20 minutes later, we are still driving. 

 

It is starting to get dark, and Mom hands Syd a map to try and figure out where we took a wrong turn.  Luckily my sister doesn’t get carsick because there is no way either Mom or I could read a map right now.  I hope that by the time we find this place, I am hungry enough to enjoy the food.  Unfortunately, our small road is not on the map, nor are the handful of roads we have intersected.  We are near Río Culebra but that is about all we know.  Dad continues driving. 

 

He follows the twists and turns until the road ends and another road crosses in front of us.  It is just as narrow and lacking pavement as the last.  No one offers a suggestion of whether to turn right or left.  He turns right.  A few minutes later, a building appears.  We pull into the gravel driveway and see that we are the only car there.  The lights are off.  Apparently Ode to the Elephants is closed today. 

 

Dad puts the car in park, and we sit there in silence, absorbing our loss of green curry.  “Should we go home and just have cereal and brazo guitano?”  We give Dad mumbles of agreement and he turns the car the way we came.  The road disappears in front of the headlights.  I look out my window and only catch glimpses of leaves that brush against the car.  I think about the Cheerios and sweet guava jelly roll I will soon eat and am glad that, once again, Mom made us stop at the grocery store for cereal the first morning of a vacation.    

 

Our conversation is coming to a close, but I don’t want to hang up the phone just yet.  “The other day I bought myself one of those white board calendars.  I’ve been really bad about checking ahead and knowing when assignments are due.”  I turn my laptop around so that my webcam faces the wall.  “It’s classy, too.  It’s just the Amazon version but I think it looks super nice.”  Mom agrees, and I tilt the computer a little bit so she has a full view of what my March will look like.  There are still a few days left in February, but I was excited to get my schedule organized.  Next week is my last physical with my childhood doctor, written in green for “appointments.” The week after, my thesis is due, written in purple for “assignments.”  The week after that, I am getting my second Covid vaccine, written in green with an exclamation mark.  It takes a second, but Mom quickly realizes that she is looking at next month.  “Oh my god, it’s not March yet, Jenna.  Take it down.”

 

“What do you mean?”  “Take it down!”  Our voices are overlapping now.  “It’s Command Strip-ed to the wall!” “Take it down!”  “Can I just erase the word March?”  “It’s not March yet you cannot have that up.  Take it down.”  “I can’t!” “Where’s February?”  I was not going to write up a month for only a few days.  “There’s only four days of February left!”  My explanation is not even considered.  “Yeah, four days!  You could be dead by then.”  “Can I just erase the title?  It’s not going to come off the wall unless I get new command strips and that seems like a waste of money.”  “I suppose.  Alright.  Put up February and then take off the 29th through the 31st.”  I laugh and reach up to make the required changes to the calendar.  “This is so funny.”  But Mom is still shaken.  “Oh my god!  Jenna!”  “I’m sorry.”  I can see she’s about to start laughing and I joke, “This is why I feel unsafe at home!”  She cracks a smile and I turn my laptop around to show her the edited calendar.  If you did not know when my thesis was due, it would appear to be the month of February.  “Whew!  Ok.  Alright.  So that’s February.”

 

I put my hands back up on the calendar and press it firmly into the wall, holding everything in place.