A John Denver Album and a Microbrew Would Go Nicely With This

What does it mean, to "go home"? Where is home, really, when your small family has migrated to a new frontier, left behind five generations of history and roots, said goodbye to a place where everything is deeply familiar, from the color of the sky to the birdcalls to the taste of the salsa? Where is home, when the new frontier is where your baby was born, where you've planted hyacinth bulbs and seen them bloom twice, now?

We moved to our new home, and mama's soul, at least, slipped right into the place, soothed by the cool air and the green-everything and the quietly buzzing creativity and easy-going nature of the perfect (to her) city. She felt right, for the first time. The universe tilted into a balance she didn't even know she'd lost. It was her place, where she was Meant to End Up. This is a good thing, since it's the hometown of the guy she married.

Still, going home ... for the first time since we took our wagon train (even farther) west, it felt OK to go back and visit. It wasn't disorienting, this time. In fact, it was really nice to breathe the thinner air and feel the specific burn of decent green chilies and touch snow.




What does it mean (if anything) that Nora wasn't born in the place where her mother was, where her grandmother was, where her great- and her great-great-grandmothers were, where her great-great-great-grandmother birthed babies and went to mass and beat her tomato plants with a broomstick? Is this place in Nora's blood, somehow?

On the first day, she toddled up through the jutting sandstone and yucca, got that damned red sand in her shoes. It stained her socks. It felt like a baptism, of sorts.

What would mama's great-great-grandfather have said about all this, having left his little town surrounded by high desert and sharply angled light, crossing a wide sea and a vast foreign country, adjusting his name for the American tongue, finally putting his boots down in a little town surrounded by high desert and sharply angled light?

Did he leave his home, or did he set out to find it? He never went back to where he was born. No one went back until his great-great-granddaughter decided to indulge in a semester of art history, and asked a cousin's cousin for an address of "some family", and had the concierge call for her because she didn't speak the language well enough, and set off on a rattling train to a tiny stop, where a tiny man ushered her into a tiny car and went zooming over the dry hills to a little town surrounded by high desert, to show her the house from which her great-great-grandfather set out, no doubt hugging his mother on the doorstep, almost 97 years before.

It's nice to imagine that he'd be proud. His great-great-grandchildren set out to find a better life for themselves, a place to carve out opportunity, a fresh start. Both of them met and married natives of this new place, so the roots were halfway down, already.

What would mama's paternal grandfather have said? He was a world traveler, the real kind, the battered-suitcase and walking-stick kind, the Richard Halliburton kind. He was a translator, he was skilled in diplomacy. What would he say about emigration, immigration, the middle place between the two, identity?

I think the grandfathers would be glad that we visited. That we brought the babies to meet their grandmothers, that we feel a certain responsibility and soft joy at connecting the generations, past to present to future.