Silver Spring, MD to Westerly, RI

Wednesday morning, after a hopeless attempt to return Amber and Vivek's house to a modicum of the state it had been when we arrived, a quick photo session, and masterful dodging of questions from Liam and Kai about why we weren't staying longer to play with Jonah, why they hadn't seen enough of Noah and Vivek, why we didn't live closer to them, when we were going to see Amber again, why didn't we know, and whether they could take the leftover chocolate-chip pancakes with them in the car, we left.  Amber pressed a bag full of food and car activities into my hand as I was walking out the door.

  We racked up the states on our way north: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York.  I was afraid to 

fall asleep for fear of missing one.  Traffic rescued Kai from sleeping all the way through Connecticut.  After flying up most of the Eastern Seaboard (I get the "sea" part but where exactly is the "board?"), we screeched to a halt on the Merritt Parkway at the first of a series of accidents so numerous and prolonged that Eric and I lost count.  On Route 95 (pronounced "route," as in "to rout your enemy," not "to pull a kumquat up by its root"), we had been traveling between 3 and 8 mph for so long that Kai began to despair of ever reaching Rhode Island ("We have been in traffic forever and we will never never never ever get there").  In desperation, I handed him my cell phone and gave him permission to call my mother.  I don't know what she said, but she managed to turn our backseat Franz Kafka into a relatively pleasant if a bit antsy little boy.  As we passed the scene of the accident, Eric and I saw a figure lying on the tarmac covered by a white sheet.

The lights of my parents' house were a welcome sight.  So were they.  It was worth driving 4900 miles to see them.

I have sand from Death Valley in my socks, wintered arroyo grass from Albuquerque stuck in my running pants, cross-country crumbs all over the back seat.  We have left socks in every region.  When I close my eyes the road still pulls down and forward and there is a red flash of a truck curving up a hill.  The New Orleans sun has a warm fragile hold under my skin, and my fingers remember the freshness of the Georgia flea market taco.  I regret now giving my stinging mouth the veto on the rest of that Pakistani lamb chop.

Eric says we don't remember what people look like or what they did as much as we remember how they made us feel.  Jean and Paul and Sam and Joe and Vivek and Amber, the ranger at Carlsbad Caverns, Dave the Balloonist, the ticket seller at Birmingham, the shopkeepers at Roanoke: thanks for letting us drop into your lives and for everything you did to make us feel so welcome.

We didn't bring a DVD player or an electronic game player with us, and I was apprehensive about how that would be.  It meant that I traveled in the back between Liam and Kai for large chunks of the trip, having "school" by making up math challenges, learning French, U.S. geography, bits of history and the sociology of the civil rights movement.  Reasons came up to read books and signs and maps, to write letters, journal entries, and thank you notes.  We met a ton of people.  We didn't kill each other.  We had wonderful luck with weather and mostly with traffic.  The car didn't break down, and the dog and most of our possessions arrived with us.  Each of us, I'm sure, knows more and better ways to push each other's buttons, but by the end of the trip the tendrils that connect each one of us to the other are thicker and more abundant.  I'm content to be enmeshed with these people, my family.   

Signing off, til the road trip to Montreal,
Juliet