And now... pancakes!

Looking at this picture, I first of all notice that Leafy's hands are huge! Sigh. They are all so big. Why is it so surprising? Like my new freckles and wrinkles always surprise me when I look in the mirror.

Speaking of surprises, I'm always taken aback by how simple pleasing my kids can be. I mean, sometimes they feel like little endless wells of need, pushing for the next fun thing, the next treat. Kids aren't notorious for being frugal. But in some ways, their pleasure in family things, in tradition, is so, so simple.

We started doing pancakes on Sunday mornings years ago. The way I work in the kitchen is that I need to be well prepared, thinking about things ahead of time. Fully aware of how much time I'm going to spend standing over the stove. And everyone loves pancakes, so it was simple to make a pancake day.

And they LOVE it. It means the world to them. It stays the same, whether or not our location changes. It is the same, it is constant. It means a lot more than food on Sunday to them. It means, This is our family. This is the way we do things. This is what our mom made.

I hear all of this in their voices when they tell people about it.

We have a few things like this. All simple. All cherished more than I would have imagined when I began them.

~Nutella on pancakes for birthday breakfasts. Nutella is ubiquitous worldwide. It's one thing I know I'll always be able to find. If I wanted to, I'm pretty sure I could find Pringles anywhere, also.

~Scavenger hunts for birthday presents. This one is a big one, because we often can't predict where birthdays will take place. A scavenger hunt takes me twenty minutes or so to set up- they get clues, they hunt for presents, they bring them back and open them. Older kids help younger kids read the clues. Clues are easy for little ones, harder for big ones. And they LOVE it. I couldn't stop if I wanted to. I'm stuck now, I'll be making clues until they're thirty.

~Speaking of birthdays, there are certain games we always play. Stop dancing when the music stops, musical chairs- always to our live Chinua music, which can be anything you want. Blues, gospel, turkish music, celtic, country. Whatever, really.

There were so many things I couldn't fathom when I first became a mother. The wilderness of family life seemed overwhelming to me. But I love tradition myself, it helps me to know what to expect, to know what is expected of me. How can I give them something special? Sometimes it's just by doing the same simple thing, over and over again. The repetition means I love you. I remembered. I always remember and I think of you every Sunday morning, when I'm mixing the batter, or you're mixing the batter, and I'm flipping the pancakes or you are.

This is so much of what practice is. I see it in all areas of my life: spiritual, family, friends, art-- how doing the same thing again and again doesn't need to be stagnant. It gives weight to love, especially when you show up with your whole heart, but even sometimes when you can't quite bring all of you. The part of you that remembers not to forget is still there, still in motion, still building something that will be lovely in the end.

Sometimes the well of feeling is unexpected. Hidden in the grass.

I was filling out a form online to order a copy of my birth certificate from the Ontario government, and I got hung up on one of the questions. It's that old guarantor question that always gets me. A guarantor is something the Canadian government wants, a person who vouches for you, who says, "She is who she says she is. She exists."

I was already emotional, filling out the form. Brampton, Ontario, I filled out. 1980. The words are old words, they touch a sore place inside of me that always wants to belong somewhere. I wrote my father's name. My mother's name. I wrote their ages when I was born. My heart hurt.

I'm already frustrated with myself because I didn't bring the birth certificates when we last left, and I should have. And I can't locate them, and I need them now. The difficulty and expense of getting them here is dragging me down. And then... a guarantor. A guarantor must be in a certain profession. A lawyer. A doctor. A chiropractor... the list goes on, but I couldn't place anyone. Who do I know like that? I drew a blank. I could think of one or two possibilities, but didn't know their work addresses, and it wasn't such a big deal really, except that I couldn't save the online form, and I'll need to begin all over again and the great distance between me and my homeland gets bigger. I don't know any lawyers. Or any dentists.

Just like that I'm almost crying, because I'm so in-valid, and I want to stick up for myself. I know I haven't lived there in a long time! But I really am Canadian, I am, and I was born somewhere, in a small town hospital, and people were glad to have me, and I come from you, great big country, and I love you and brag about you all across Asia.

Who can be my guarantor? Who can guarantee my existance? Maybe the litchi lady, who delivers litchis from her motorbike each day. She sits in front of the house and calls until we notice her, and we never turn her down because her litchis are the best and the season won't last forever.

On a bus ride to Chiang Mai a few weeks ago, I met an American tourist who told me, "Aw, you're practically American, you've got American kids, an American husband. You're American, I'll buy you a shirt with an American flag on it." And I was all, "No!" And he got insulted, but it's nothing against him, it's nothing against the place that I learned to love. It's about something that never goes away, the first seeds in your garden, the beginning of your life, I don't want to lose it, I don't want it taken from me by a glib tourist who has the bad habit of putting Canada down, like so many other ignorant people I've met. And besides, if you ask my youngest son where he's from, he sometimes says "Bangkok," sometimes, "The India," and sometimes "Sam Francisco," depending on his mood. I'm not sure how "American" that makes him.

That pang in my heart is the same feeling I got in the sewing shop the other day, looking at tape measures and pins and scissors. My heart was going thud thud thud and I got that hot feeling in my face, like I was going to cry. I half grew up in the fabric and sewing shop that my grandparents owned, and who can imagine the feelings you can pull out of a rack of buttons? It's gone, is what I think. And then, she's gone. And that still hurts so much, that my grandmother is gone and I still really really want her. I don't want her to be gone, I want her voice again, her self that doesn't match anyone else's self.

All those Edmonton dark mornings, getting in Grandma and Grandpa's car and going to the store on freezing days, when it was thirty below and we could hear the tired hum of the heaters coming to life. My sister and I counted zippers, buttons, for hours. We were the helpers, taking inventory in January. The store smelled amazing, like cloth everywhere, and my grandma often hummed while she worked, and she made us these sandwiches with thick slices of bread, and Grandpa teased us under the fluorescent lights, and then years later, I disappeared, I moved away.

My kids complain if it's 20 degress (celcius) outside. "It's COooLLLD!" they say. We're so far from there, yet this is what we've become, and still, somehow we're that, but how to keep track of it all? How to keep the threads from fraying?

At the Thai sewing shop, I was able to keep the tears back because I spotted a six foot tall cross-stitched picture of one of Thailand's prior kings. There are humongous pictures of the King and his ancestors everywhere in Thailand, but never have I seen one done by needlepoint.  It literally knocked me speechless and made me realize, no, this isn't Canada, it can never be, but here there are different things, things that revolve around their own memories, and things that carve out stories for everyone to believe and honor. I have my grandmother and her scissors making a snap snap across a bolt of fabric. Here there is the King and the Queen, and I'm sure Thai people love Durian (which people sometimes call stink fruit because of the smell) mostly because it's a smell of their childhoods and it marks something: the child who never goes away, the story that can't die! It can't, it can't.

Even if the telling is as soft as falling leaves, it has to land somewhere in the snow or in the jungle. It sleeps inside me, roused only by birth certificate applications and the smell of bobbins bright as the sun.

But who can be my guarantor? The tomato farmers? The man at the shop where I buy my bread? I'm neither here nor there. I'm somewhere in between.

There is a truck headed for Pai with our table, benches, rattan love seat and chairs, and desks on it. Success!

Today I pick up my new sewing machine, shop for fabric, (another story) and get back on the bus for the three hour drive to Pai. Today I will be a fabric shopping superhero!

...supports me even though I live far away, which is hard for her (and for me).

...is generous and loving.

...is a wonderful grandma. The other day, Leafy found a frangipani flower. It was a large white one, very fragrant, and it captivated him.

"This reminds me of Grandma and Grandpa," he said.

"Yeah, because there are flowers near Grandma and Grandpa's house!" YaYa said.

"No, not of their house. It reminds me of Grandma and Grandpa. Because it's so nice."

They are very high on the list of favorite flowers for me, and I thought it was so special that it brought him back to them. But I digress.

...tells me kind and loving things constantly.

...has always loved me, even when I was a teenager who had difficulty controlling my emotions.

I love you, Mom. Thanks for being you.

The tomato farmers were a couple. They looked very, very young and they brought this little delight.

So I had fun photographing him and trying to make him smile. He was very serious with me, but he smiled for YaYa. Of course. She's such a winner with babies and animals.

I asked my landlord what hill tribe the couple was from, and they discussed it amongst themselves for a while. They were trying to think of what the English word for Hmong was, but I picked it out of what they were saying in Thai, and came to the rescue. "Hmong?" I asked. And my landlord said, "Oh! Same in English!"

Our landlord says that he speaks a few words of a lot of hilltribe languages. I'm kind of excited for more tomato days, because I want to meet more people from the mountains around here. There are many Shan people in Pai, and Lahu, and Lisu as well. These were the first Hmong people I've met since we moved here.

Our neighbor from across the street came and played, and everyone oohed and aahed at the baby boy.

 And I oohed and aahed at the baby wrap that his mother made for him. Oooohhh. Aaaaahh.

This is that window I was telling you about. This is what the light looks like, around 4:00, when the house is still really hot, and maybe I sit under the fan for awhile, and then I think, I should get to the market to see about vegetables for dinner. But I don't want to stop looking at the light, and those trees beyond the window. The market waits for a few more minutes. Thai food is fast and easy to cook, anyways.

I'm not so into the lace curtains, and I'll probably make some new ones. But they do make me nostalgic for something... I can't tell what. Maybe it's just that all beautiful things make me nostalgic, and especially light. It comes every day, the light, and our lives are formed by the shapes it makes around us. Shadows that follow us or tilt away from us at alarming angles. Patches of light on my children's faces when we sit under trees on a sunny day. And when the sun heads home for the day and the light fades, it gives that one last startling flare of color, and we know we'll see it again soon. We can count on it.

I figure that if we're going to be in Thailand, living in a big wooden house in the center of town is a great way to do it. We're smack dab in the middling bustleness, or the bustling middleness, of this village. People can wander by and see how we do life, how we cook. How we sit under the tree for breakfast and how we can't get through a meal without spilling stuff or a day without a few thousand hugs.

(To answer my friend Leaf's question, I'm currently sitting under the tree to write, but the table there doesn't fit my legs under it. There is the tiniest of rooms in the back of the downstairs of the house that I fell in love with as soon as I saw it, and when I get a desk in there, it's all over. I'm a writing fool.)

Our neighbors as well as people wandering by can see how we have meltdowns and lie on the floor making whale noises. (Well, the smallest of us.) How we use cardboard boxes as robot costumes or houses. They can see what I'm cooking for dinner, they can see me hanging my laundry or hosing spilled smoothie off of the bricks in the courtyard. I've been in a few places lately where I start to tell someone where I live and they say, "Oh, I know. My girlfriend lives across the street," or "I saw you there the other day."

I totally get curiousity. We're curious too. I know I love to stare at people. (There's a cultural shift for you- I don't think it's as cool with people if you stare at them in Thailand as it is in India.) I'd say that satisfying people's curiosity is part of our family modus operandi. Because who would do it if we didn't? How would Thai people know what dreadlocks feel like, without YaYa around to patiently let them sneak a hand out and touch hers?

So, dear neighbors, we know we're interesting and a little strange. You can watch us all you want, just as long as we can watch you too.

There's my little wish for fish for the morning.

But here I am. I'm Rae. Getting settled in a new country is going to involve a lot of existential angst. Because I'm trying to find our WAY here. Do you know that part of househunting? Where you look around and around and you see all these things and your mind is in overdrive, trying to imagine yourself in each of the settings. You could climb the tree in that yard! That tiny alcove could be your office! And you go around and around and in the end you find a place. You take it. And suddenly you don't have all the dreams, you don't have all the possibilities, you have what you have, and here you are. Bam. Make a home.

And I'm a bit confused. What do I do with teak? It's so.... wooden. And amazing. And essentially Thai! And I'm not essentially Thai. So I'm looking at all this wood, stunned by its beauty and a little mystified. How do I make it mine? Sometimes I'm just not sure of myself, not sure that I can make a house a home. But the house? The house is wonderful. It's cool and quirky and amazing. It's right in the middle of town.

The little street (soi) is tiny. I went all the way across it, practically in the opposite neighbor's yard, but I couldn't get the whole thing in my frame. I think half the house is that roof. Chinua said that in Asia the size of your roof is a sign of value.

Do you see tiny Leafy there? We practically live under that tree. In fact, I would be out there right now if it wasn't so incredibly hot. I'm taking refuge on the floor beside the fan right now. That bamboo fence thing on the right side of the photo is our kitchen. The landlords don't want to smell up the teak with cooking smells, so we have to cook outside. And this is where I get that shivery feeling that says, "Look how this all works out..." because I've made such a big deal about how much I love cooking outside, how my dream home has an outdoor kitchen, how it makes me feel like I'm barely working at all, because there I am, outdoors! And guess what! Mandatory outdoor kitchen for you, Rae Rae. I'm a blessed girl.

There is a garage thing behind the kitchen space, but the landlords use it for their tomato sorting business. When the tomatoes come, like they did yesterday, the garage door gets opened and we just step around the tomatoes. It's fun. Very villagey.

Kid A's feeling great in this photo, because he just cooked himself some eggs.

By lunchtime, I had mopped the floor. I mop the floor every day, and every day it gets crazy dirty because there are water fights and things of that sort, and I always say, "Don't get the water in the kitchen!" but somehow, mysteriously, they always forget.

Mmmm. What are those two eating? PB and J.

And what's Chinua making? Litchi juice. Of course. What a man I have. I'm a blessed girl.

We got a blender and we can't stop making smoothies because it's hot and fruit and ice are falling out of the sky. Hot season is litchi season, mangosteen season, mango season... yum.

Inside. Everything looks a bit infernal. I think I had the camera on the wrong setting, because it doesn't normally LOOK this red. The house came with a TV, which was a big selling point when people told us about it. How can we say we don't care about TV when people are so excited about giving us one? I'm personally more excited about the wooden Ibex head on the wall. A little friend.

Our bedroom. Do you see what I mean about summer camp?

Big kid's bedroom, although we're still not sure about this. It has a bigger bed. We're not sure if the biggest people should get the biggest bed or not.

Here's one of our very simple Asian bathrooms. One of the THREE. Score!!!

A little bedroom for the little boys.

And a sweet porch. It's been far too hot to sit on it, so far. But when it cools down, I'm sure it will be amazing.

Oh, here's a photo of the internet guy. Totally protected. Boots, even. We're not in India.

And the best part of the house? This large lovely room that was built under the stilt part of the house. Ahhhh. Room for homeschool, for living space, for eating, for having people over...

 So. When are you coming over? The litchi juice is waiting.

And I've barely gone anywhere! We're just here, sitting in the capital, waiting for our Thai visas to be ready. And instead of being ready to go back to Thailand, my heart wants to travel farther into Laos and see what it's really like.

We are low on funds and low on energy for travel (seeing as we have a two day drive ahead of us, just to get back) so we didn't do it this time. We realize there are limits to what we can ask of our children. But one day... For sure.

If Bangkok is the ultra modern teenage version of a South East Asian capital, Vientiane is its old auntie. Beautiful, still caught a little in post-colonialism, with big trees and shady streets. Vientiane is quiet, calm. She's let herself go a little. She's not sleek, but she's lovely. I'm reminded of Panjim, the capital of Goa.

Laos was colonized by the French, so everywhere you look there are French restaurants and baguettes. In fact, I'm willing to believe that the most influential thing the colonialists left behind in various spots in Asia was bread. In Goa, the Portuguese rolls, Pao, that are a staple of Marathi and Goan food now. In Laos, baguettes.

I'm not thinking of baguettes, however, because Laotian food is divine. Why waste time on French food when you can have a mung bean shake or the most divine fried rice you've ever tasted? Or bamboo stalks that taste a lot like asparagus, and the list goes on. And I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. But it's already time to go.

Chinua and the kids even ordered something on the menu called "Ginger Frog." And they ate it. (Even YaYa!) And liked it. I couldn't do it. I'm a long way from my nineteen-year-old cockroach eating self, friends. You can find frog in Pai. Not on most menus, though.

The people here are lovely and soft-hearted. One woman let out a shriek of delight as she saw our kids walking along the street. "Sabaidee!" you hear everywhere. It's a greeting, but I think it more literally means "How's it going?" Poor Solo has just learned Sawadee Krap in Thai... and when people speak to him in the Laos language, he answers them in Thai. Which may be like being called American when you're Canadian. But they love him anyways. It's got to be confusing for the poor guy. He can't tell that we've crossed a border.

The internet guy just hooked up the internet. Five minutes ago. I'm amazed by how quickly things happen in Thailand. As well the safety equipment the guy was wearing. This was no barefoot young guy standing on a knot of wires. Odd.

And in a few minutes, we climb into our rental car to drive for a couple of days to get to Vientiane, Laos, where we will apply for our student visas. And then maybe we won't have to go anywhere for awhile.

And I can continue to tell you all about all the little stuff of life, like the way the afternoon sun comes in through my window and it reminds me of camp, or of the Land, and the way that makes my heart hurt and feel good, all at once.

I look forward to it.

(I also look forward to Laos. The kids aren't looking forward to the drive. I think they're a little traveled out.)