Tracks of the Soul

I remember sitting in the back of the limousine: myself, the two kids, the baby, my mother-in-law, and our Siberian Husky in a dog crate. There was a foot of snow on the ground but rain had created a fogbank, so we glided out of our old neighborhood as if flying through a cloud, past the cozy bungalows steaming with heat, past the vacant summer cottages with blank window eyes, past our scruffy spit of lakefront beach, up the hill, and away, away from my children's friends, my friends, their schools, their birthplace, the only home they'd ever known.

The ride to the airport hotel was silent, all of us caught up in our separate worlds. Even the dog was quiet, head resting between her paws, already groggy from the tranquilizers the vet gave us for the cross-country trip. Stan was to meet us at the airport later that night since the moving company was creating a horrid, muddled mess of it, complaining about the stairs, the attic , our books, and taking our furniture out unprotected in the rain. They were hours past their bug-out time and with no end in sight, we elected for me to take the kids to the airport hotel and Stan would get their whenever the movers left, as long as he made it for the 8:00 a.m. flight the next morning.

My family was under strict orders to stay away. We'd already had a mournful, gut-wrenching good-bye at my sister's the day before and the knots in my stomach had not eased. Jessica and I had sobbed with broken hearts on the way home until Stan turned to us with a look of wonder and said "Boy, you must really love me to do this." Yes, I guess we did.

My mother-in-law was the most silent of all, sitting in her ramrod straight position, a posture I would come to know and hate at times during our sojourns together. This new vagabond, melded family was shape-shifting in the limo, trying on new roles of rebels, travelers, cast-abouts, feeling like voyeurs in our own lives. Later on we would half-jest about being in the underground witness protection program, and this was just the beginning of our vanquishing. Only the baby was unperturbed, still on my familiar shoulder, close to breast. She had just turned one and would be eight before we finally made the circle complete. My eyes hurt from crying and my head was tight with adrenalin and sleeplessness. I sighed at one point and they all turned to me. Automatically I smiled, beaming at them with lies: "Isn't this fun, what an adventure!" My daughter's lip quivered, my mother-in-law did not react.

I didn't know the language to use to console them in this uncharted territory. I could not explain the future in the old syntax when it stared at us in hieroglyphs. The children were sick of words, we all were. We needed runes to hold in our hand and divine what portents lay before us. We needed lucky charms to ward off the evil eye. Instead of a seatbelt, I wished I had a medicine bag strapped around my waist. From a magic pouch, I could spread out pieces of our lives on the leather seat next to me and they could hold the pieces on the journey:

- a pine bough sticky with resin from the tall trees that sheltered our house;
- a flask of water from the lake where Jessica passed the test to swim to the float when she was only 6;
- peach-colored baby booties that my mother knit for Jessica and that each baby had worn;
- hardened bits of Playdough and Barbie shoes from endless wintry days spent at neighbors' homes, new moms crashed together trying to survive;
- tarralla cookies redolent of almonds and holidays from their great-grandmother and great-aunt ;
- the cinders from my father's pipe;
- a feather from the large crow caught on the webbing over the vegetable garden, which I was too afraid to release and ran to my neighbor's for help. That night Stan came home and told us we were moving;
- a velvet pillow from my mother's long sofa, which we five sisters fought over each night watching TV, rushing to get there first and establish the dominance of lying full out with the runner-up wedged into a spot at the end;
- a snowglobe of real snow from the hill by the sporting club where my little son tried to teach himself to ski;
- blossoms of riotous color from bearded irises my husband planted;
- the Pepsi Cola light that hung over my parent's round picnic table on the screened porch where we lived all summer long;
- the lid of a fish tin from my grandfather's peddler truck, now used to make pizza;
- my sisters' lipsticks: raisin for Alicia; magenta for Mar; cherry red for Maria;
- the watercolor of forest animals my sister Carol made to mark the occasion of Jessica's birth;
- French fries from the diner where Stan and I had our first date;
- the walls of stencils I had painted during sleepless nights when my grandmother was dying;
- the little amethyst ring that cracked from the cold the day we skated in the falling snow; and lastly,
- a translucent lusterware teapot from which infinite cups of tea had been poured round my table, my mother's table, my grandmother's table, and my great-grandmother's table to a line of strong, loving women that stretched from Sicily to New York.

But that day I wore no magical velvet pourch around my my waist. As the black limousine rode up the big hill and stopped for the oncoming traffic, we all turned and craned our necks for the last glimpse of our home, but all we could see was the top of the spruce trees peeking out from the fog. And the only symbols I carried with me in the limousine that I could use to reassure them were my own hands, which I stretched out to them as the limousine made the turn and we emerged from the fog into the grey winter light. The pieces of our lives would travel within us.