Sitting here in our living room on the eve of leaving for Minnesota, I feel the hum of something ending and something beginning. Jody and I are selling our Minnesota home of twenty-five years, and we are ready to lovingly pass it to another family.
I look around our Florida home and it no longer feels like an Airbnb, as it did at the beginning of the season. Jody and I have made it ours. Nothing has changed, really—the same living room pieces, the same dining room table, the same buffet—but everything has changed because it is lived in. Claimed. Ours.
We’ve hosted many poker games here. New friends who became old friends. Laughter in the kitchen, cards sliding across felt, stories told and retold.
Jody and I are standing between two homes: one built over twenty-five years through labor, parenting, maintenance, memories, and endurance; the other built through choice, community, friendship, play, and reinvention. Neither house is the true source of belonging. Jody and I are. We made both homes alive. We can do it again anywhere.
Even traveling the summer months in our RV.
We’ve learned home is not a place we keep—it is something we create, carry, and recreate.
And, how are the children? At twenty-four, with a degree in environmental science under her belt and an apprentice electrician’s card in his pocket, they are forging their own path
How are the adults?
Dang—we are hitting the road.
After building a life for others, this is the season Jody and I built one for ourselves.
Quality sleep generally suffers when serious, worrisome, or sad things press on daily life. And here we are with a horrible cacophony of such news screaming across the media, in grocery store lines, and casual conversations as friends and family look for some tiny assurance that the world, our country, or at least a personal circle could be okay.
Driving through rural areas in late winter, bags hang from trees ready to tap maple sap. Other trees might also be tapped, but maple trees are the largest producers. Tubing might zig-zag through a larger tree stand instead to gather sap into larger lines and run to collection tanks. For a small syrup maker, the sap will fill bags or pails which will be collected then carried to the sugar house location.
Forty gallons of sap are needed to make one gallon of maple syrup. The sap is boiled over an open flame until extra fluid is gone, then foam is removed and the syrup filtered. The process is time consuming with possibilities for accidents like burns and back strains.
Some syrup seasons snow still stands in the woods. As kids we filled small bowls with snow then bothered adults until syrup was poured over it. We learned how putting the maple candy in your mouth too quickly could painfully burn a tongue and how hot maple syrup splatter hurt on bare flesh. Regardless of age, we walked around the tubing, hot fires or equipment. No running for so many reasons.
If weather affects trees or harvest happens too late, the sap might be cloudy or bitter wrecking a season. If sap is undercooked or overcooked the syrup will be of lower quality. If deer and bears mess with piping the sap may drain onto the ground instead of filling the collection tank. Many things can reduce production from 20 gallons to a few or nothing.
The world seems to operate with the similar equations as maple syrup. A whole lot of good raw material or information may be required to produce a small amount of awesome happiness. There are many ways to interfere with delivery of the good and deliver serious, worrisome, or sad results. Maybe when sleep is disrupted, the thought of breakfast including fresh maple syrup can sweeten dreams or at least make the night hours pass easier. Forty gallons of springtime sap into a few tablespoons of delight.
Rain hammered the passenger van, rattling the metal like gravel tossed against a tin roof. Each burst sounded closer, louder, as if the storm were trying to break its way in. Why today, of all days, when Juan was visiting his birth family?
We had planned it so carefully. We’d even had a kind of rehearsal the day before with Crystel’s birth family. The sun shone right up until the moment we left the amusement park. It couldn’t have been more perfect, her birth family and extended family gathered for lunch, then rides. Laughter. Fun. Unity. All the while, Jody and I worked quietly together, reading each other’s cues, me opening the bright orange Pollo Campero boxes, warm with chicken and fries, and her spreading the food across the tables and twisting open bottles of soda.
Outside, the rain was relentless, steady and unforgiving, as if reminding us again and again: there is no escaping the comparisons, no matter how hard we tried.
Jody and I insisted, repeatedly, “You can’t compare, kids. Your birth families are different. Circumstances are different. You are both deeply loved by your birth moms and families, that’s what matters. No one is better, and no one is less. What you can do is help each other through these visits.”
That became our refrain across five birth-family visits, beginning when they were nine.
Guatemala was both their birth country and our vacation destination. We hiked. We cliff-jumped. We wandered through villages. Volcanoes rose near and far, and water threaded our days, rivers, lakes, sudden downpours. We even considered buying a home there, going so far as to meet with realtors and walk through properties for sale.
Some days ended with rainbows.
Juan and Crystel, now twenty-one, encouraged and supported each other during their visits. Crystel insisted Juan stay close to her, and Juan counted on her to be the cord connecting him to his birth sister.
Comparisons drizzled in. Rain or sun. Large family, small family. City or remote mountain village. Kiosk trinkets or hand-woven cloth.
Juan traced circles on the fogged window and said nothing. With his other hand he held tight to his girlfriend Aryanna, pressed close beside him, as if neither of them wanted to risk losing the other. It was her first time in Guatemala, and in a short while she would meet his birth mom.
Rain pressed in from the outside, forcing us closer together. The windows wouldn’t clear. Plans changed again and again. Finding Juan’s birth mom, Rosa, and explaining where we could meet her became a chore. We had to rely on others for communication. Juan and Crystel, after years of schooling, spoke Spanish hesitantly, enough to get by, not yet fluent.
Crystel kept checking her phone, chuckling to herself, probably on WhatsApp with the group chat her oldest birth sibling had created. I watched her, the quick way her fingers flew across the keypad, and felt a swell of relief. She was in charge now, exactly what Jody and I had hoped for. Beneath that relief was an ache I couldn’t quite name. Her spirit, bubbly, light, unrestrained, lit the van. It was the best part of her.
I wasn’t in control. Exhausted, I leaned my head against the damp windowpane and let my knee rest against Jody’s. She reached for my hand and held it tight. Our warmth gave me a moment’s reprieve, just enough. I had done so much research before our Guatemala trips, planning the vacation and each birth-family meeting. There was always something new to look forward to, some adventure we hadn’t tried yet. Hang gliding off a volcano was supposed to be the latest, a plan the rain scrapped at the base of the mountain road.
What Jody and I could control was bringing the kids to see their birth families. Before every visit there was a crescendo, the build-up, the tension, the pressure to get it right. We had only four to six hours. And then we took our children back home.
How is that fair?
We had the children for a lifetime. We could bring them for a visit and then leave. I wonder now if each visit left a bruise we couldn’t see, a reminder that reunion was always followed by another leaving.
All of these thoughts churned in the relentless rain. Plans shifted to meeting at a mall.
Would the visit be enough? It had to be.
The mall rose out of the sprawling city, volcano silhouettes in the distance and palm fronds brushing the edges of the parking lot. Jody squeezed my hand, then let go. “We’re here,” she said, gathering the gift bags. Inside, the rush of air-conditioning wrapped around us, a shock after the humid air that smelled faintly of rain and exhaust. Spanish pop music echoed off the tiled floors, layered with bursts of laughter. My eyes widened like a kid at Christmas. Bright storefronts glowed in rows, mannequins in glossy shoes, phone screens flashing. I hadn’t expected this in Guatemala. It could have been the Mall of America. A kiosk brewed coffee dark and sweet, the scent mingling with fresh bread and fried empanadas.
“Beth,” Jody urged, “keep walking.”
“Yeah, you’re staring again, Mom,” Crystel said.
Rosa, Juan’s birth mom, and Ani, his sister, spotted us first.
Rosa reached for Juan’s hand. “Mi hijo,” she whispered.
I saw Jody step slightly back, giving them space, her eyes shining but fixed on Juan, as if she were willing him courage.
Juan’s smile was small, careful. “Hola.”
We had come for adventure, hang-gliding off volcanoes, cliff-jumping into clear water. The real leap was here, in a mall court, watching our son meet the woman who first held him. I held my breath.
Aryanna, full of anticipation, studied Rosa’s face, wanting this distant mother to see her as Juan’s special person. Crystel had already sidled up to Ani, a few years younger than she and Juan, slipping an arm through hers. They stood there together, comfortable as sisters. Each of them loved Juan in their own way.
In that bright, echoing mall, families shopped for shoes and phones while ours tried, in four short hours, to stitch together a kind of love that would hold until the next visit.
Visits that were never promised. Only hoped for.
On the drive back to the hotel, a faint arc appeared in the clearing sky, the beginning, maybe, of double rainbows. I wondered which of us would feel the bruise first, and how long it would linger.
