Mother Airways

"I am so sorry for you. How are you doing?" she says, squinting in the light filtering through the canopy of green leaves shading her driveway. Shuffling with age but appearing as polished as she did when she was my mother-in-law two decades ago. 

It takes a moment for me to understand what she means because the words sound like death. And I'm only there to take a carload of donations from the basement. Items my adult daughter is discarding because she is leaving for Scotland for her master's degree.

I want to say that Conner and his family left a third-floor apartment, and Alexis is leaving a basement. But I don't. I smile and tell her it is sad, but mostly I'm excited. 

She gracefully turns in her own shadow and leads me inside to a house that still feels a little like home even though I don't want it to. 

I was fifteen when I first set foot in that house; thirty when I stepped out. 

As I haul my daughter's belongings into the back of my car, just as we did with her brother a few months ago, I know I have done something right to have raised kids who are brave enough to fly the nest.

Welcome aboard Mother Airways. The airlines refer to passengers as souls. Their job is to safely move us about on our journeys. We have three souls in Alaska. One in Moscow, Idaho. Two under our roof plotting their path into the world. 

And one on her way to Scotland fulfilling a lifelong dream. 

In a half-hour, I will drive her to the airport, and we all cry. But this is the job of a mother. We hold onto them with our hearts, not our hands. 

Thank you for flying with us. Your destination awaits you.

 

 

the road

The road makes us laugh. The way it heaves, buckling at the ice below. It splits and curls like white caps. Welcome to the edge of the Alaskan Highway. I drive it like a bull rider, watching for the dip in the shoulders to tell me which way to lean. 

"You're good at this," he says from the passenger seat as the last of the Yukon peels from beneath the tires.

"I am good at it because I'm good at not trusting the road, and this road is certainly not to be trusted."

He laughs and cracks the window to smell the air.

I would stay forever in the Yukon. Tucked inside the isolation and a tent behind a bear fence. I sleep better in the shadows of mountains than buildings. And I live better in the face of real danger than I do walking with the fear in my head.

I have bitten through my lip, the metallic taste of blood minges with my cold cup of coffee. 

Wild swans swim in pairs out on the mountainous lakes. They are so white and alluring we pull over to see them. He rolls a smoke and adjusts his hat gestures from another time.

Then we get back in the car because we have somewhere to be. And that somewhere is not the Yukon; it is Alaska. So we drive the Alaskan Highway to the border and slip back into the US after four days and three nights of driving the Canadian Provinces. Passing through mountains cradling gravely blue glaciers. Watching the rivers of white water and stone roll down yawning valleys and spotting herds of bison, elk, caribou, and sheep.

All the coffee was good. I can't say the same for the beer. The road always made us laugh, but it's what is at the end of the road that makes us truly happy.