the Caracas valley
Landscape with an aerial view of wetlands in Everglades National Park at sunset, Florida, USA
Homesick is one of those odd words that means something different to everyone. It usually involves a particular memory and an emotion that accompanies it. When my parents left Venezuela, I was in boarding school in Massachusetts. It was a November, cold and wet, I remember. My dad’s letter about this move arrived by snail mail. I reaslized I wouldn’t be spending Christmas in Caracas but in Florida, the place whee we would be living. It meant I never got a chance to say good-bye.
It also meant I would be spending my last year in high school in a Florida school. It turned out to be one of the worst years of my life. When you enter a senior class as a first-time student, you’re an outlier. I hated that year, I hated Florida. So when I applied to college, I chose spots in the northeast. Far from Florida.
I ended up in Utica, New York.
When Rob and I traveled to Venezuela in 1987, my parents were with us. Megan hadn’t been born yet. It was our first time back in 24 years. The moment I saw the country from the air, an almost crippling homesickness swept over me. Chavez and Maduro were unknown entities back then.
We saw the building in Las Mercedes where we had lived for years in Caracas. We knocked on the door of our old apartment on the second floor and met the woman and her family who lived there then. In Maracaibo, where we’d lived for 5 years and where my sister, Mary, had been born, the four of us traipsed through what had been an oil camp and was now a maze of streets and confused memories.
I remember asking my dad the address of where we’d lived. He got the street, but not the house number. Suddenly, he shouted, “Number 57!”
Here, we also knocked on the door and the couple who came to the door was gracious and curious. When my dad explained that we had lived in this house, they invited us in and we spent an enjoyable afternoon in the wonderful backyard I remembered.
On the way back from a recent trip to Texas with Megan, I happened to look out the window as we were passing over the Everglades. Now, understood, I’ve only been into the Everglades a couple of times. It’s not home. But it’s part of Florida. That same almost crippling homesickness seized me.
Florida! I was nearly home.
The irony hit me. The place I’d once hated was now the place I called home.
Synchronicity has a way of closing lifelong loops, I think, and allowing old wounds to heal.
