Home Bodies
At the traffic light next to the pink brick wall, my kids stir from sleep. It’s been a long trip for their four- and six-year old bodies, a ten-hour red-eye followed by this four-hour drive across rolling hills into São Paulo’s lowland countryside. Bodies heavy, emotions tense. But at this light, the car feels lighter. Funny how as a child I, too, always woke up at the exit for home, though my exit was off the Baltimore beltway.
My husband’s hometown has the same claustrophobic effect on me no matter how many times we visit. It is a maze of terra-cotta roofs peeking out from above indistinct cement walls and towering privacy fences. To my American body, it’s disorienting, having grown up glancing into windows as if the world were an endless Edward Hopper painting. I can’t tell one street from another. My kids, though, they know these streets. “Woo-hoo,” they exclaim, their exhaustion having evaporated. “Just two more streets, then right, and then we’ll be at Vovó’s house!” And just as they say, we pass two identical intersections and turn right before Tio Teus pulls over and parks in front of my husband’s childhood home.
I look at my kids and I think of salmon, swimming upstream for thousands of miles. I think of homing pigeons, finding their way home from thousands of miles away. I think of pronghorn antelope, traversing the same migratory route for thousands of years, despite obstruction from human development. I think of tiny coral larvae, maneuvering their way through the ocean to return to where they were spawned. It’s been discovered that the smell from even one drop of a salmon’s birth stream can help them find their way home.
The kids fight over who gets to open the van door, their excitement barely contained in their tiny bodies. They fly out of the van into Vovó’s waiting arms. Inside, baskets of warm pão de queijo, fresh cut mango. She’s added to the walls with photos we’ve shared electronically in the year since our last visit. Wrapped gifts lay on top of their makeshift beds, which they unwrap while sprawled on Vovó’s lap. And I see it so clearly. Of course my kids know how to get here, with nothing but gray cement walls to guide them. Like salmon and coral finding their way home, my kids follow the greatest magnetic field of all.
