Home, finally

I'm writing this at my mother's kitchen table in Duluth, with the window open and the wind coming up the hill off the lake.

The little plane landed on Wednesday afternoon. My mother was waiting just past security, the way she's waited for me since college, standing very straight with her purse held in front of her in both hands. I meant to say something. I didn't. I put my arms around her and she put hers around me and we stood in the way of everyone coming off the flight until a man with a golf bag had to go around us.

She's smaller than I remembered. I don't think she's changed. I think I'd been carrying her around in my head at the size she was when I was a child, and eighteen months on the phone hadn't corrected it. She smells exactly the same, which I was not prepared for at all.

On Thursday morning I walked down to the lake before she was up. It's a few streets down from the house, and I've walked it a thousand times, and I still stopped at the top of the last block to look. Lake Superior doesn't do anything for anyone. It's the size it is and the temperature it is, and in June that temperature makes your ankles ache within a minute. I stood in it anyway, up to my shins, until I couldn't feel my feet, and then I sat on a rock and let them come back.

On Friday we drove down to Canal Park because a freighter was due in, and we stood on the pier like tourists while it came under the bridge and the horns went back and forth. My father used to say you could tell which engineer was on watch by how a boat came in. I don't know if that was true. My mother held my arm the whole time, and neither of us said anything about him, and both of us were thinking it.

The rest of it has been small. Groceries. Her friends, carefully, outdoors. Walleye. A long argument about whether the porch needs painting, which it does. I sleep in my old room under the same quilt and wake up at five because the sun comes up so early here, and I don't mind.

I fly back next Saturday. I'm trying not to count.