Home Sweet Home

“Always look up …  to the sky” he said
“But why?”
“Why not …
 … Because no one else does”
I was 25 when I learned my dad was from the sky. Of the sky.
I used to think of him as grounded, rooted in the everyday, supporting us, like a
good family man. But at 25, I hung upside down, like a child, from my knees and saw
him as the sky. Stretched wide, far, he covers us, the world, with his tangled net of
responsibilities, thin enough to let the sun shine through.
Riding passenger in his car, he’d poke a finger up at the clouds: “Look, how
fluffy, characteristic of late summer” he’d say before delving into the pressure systems
and weather patterns that make this particular cloud formation possible. I’d heard this
story often, enough that my eyes gently rolled when his finger inevitably popped up,
jabbed at the sky as we zoomed around town and his eyes flicked briefly, from the road,
upwards. At 25, I realized this up-tick, furtive glance towards the sky, was the inevitable
pull, like magnets, of two sky blue marbles, towards his origin.
He told me once that he could fly. Airplanes that is, but my youthful brain saw
him gulp the air, fill his lungs and leave the earth, swimming towards the firmament. He
came back to earth, the day we were born. Gave up his wings for family life. But at 25,
he showed me the earth is but a wingless way to touch the sky.
“Taste them … the tomatoes” she said
“But why?”
“Can’t you taste the soil … the sun … these are from the earth”
Not one for subtlety, my mom, her boxful of ashes, is of the earth. But before her
death, on a summer day, I poured a palmful of river over her brown knee. Marveled at the
way the water split, opened, and narrowed, creating islands of dark skin, earth, within the
matrix of quickly falling liquid. I knew then that her body came from an ancient source,
could stand up to the wind, the rain, weathered but never washed away.
At the dinner table, I got up to fix the salad, and she said “keep going, five
minutes, you need to love the salad, marry the flavors”. Tummy rumbling, I gently
sighed, but clamped the tongs, up, twist, release, repeat, because she knew, even then, the
earth would heal us.
I used to think of her as weightless, sky-borne, free to test the upper limits of her
own desires, but from the window of an airplane, she chose to photograph the earth, the
greens and browns and yellows, so that on solid ground, she could paint her canvases in
the colors of her origin.
In the spring of grief, she shows me how to endure. The gift of erosion unfurls
from the earth, blooming, fruiting, so that in summer, I can taste the soil… the sun. She
shows me in the empty spaces, her absences, that she is still the earth.
“Never say no …  to a dip in the river”
“But why?”
“Because the water is never the same …
… it will always be different, when you come out again.”

Shirtless, we shriek, uninhibited, as rainbow water shoots skyward from the tip of
the hose, and falls, cooling our brown shoulders on its way to the earth. Steaming from
the sun-baked ground, we play for hours, little children who make rain on a cloudless
day.
Later, we pull up to the edge of the world. Really, a fogged in cliff-side, but from
the open door of our car, we pretend the dense cloud of suspended water particles is all
that’s left, and we listen to invisible waves that crash unseen at the bottom of the end.
I never knew if we came from above, blanket wrapped babies, delivered by storks,
or from below, two girls and a boy, plucked from the pliable core of bamboo shoots. But
one day, from the sand looking out, we saw the liminal space where earth and sky
become a single line of silver light. Unflinching, we ran, until waist deep, gently bobbing
in the waves, we learned of our origins.
Sometimes we dive, deep, and plunge our fingers into cool mud, rough sand,
grasp at smooth rocks. The substrate does not matter. But we always rise again, breach
the surface, legs burning, face turned skyward. This is how we learn to be of both
worlds.