Wait! I Recognize This...

After walking down the eighty-eight steps from the road to the beach wryly named 1000 Steps Beach, I looked around and was keenly aware of a deep and internal recognition of this place I had never been before.  It was a simultaneously strange and comforting feeling.

I've heard about Bonaire my whole life as it was home to my parents and three older siblings for six years in the 1960s.  There are many family stories of life on this paradise island in the Netherland Antilles.  "The Caribbean" was an everyday word in my childhood, and a place that the other five members of my immediate family were intimately acquainted with, and yet it was no more real for me than a make-believe land in my favorite fairytale in terms of my experiential knowledge of this magical world.

Until last week that is.  

Our parents are now both deceased, and it's been 55 years since my family lived in Kralendijk, Bonaire.  My three siblings have never returned together to their childhood home, and when they decided to finally make it happen after years of contemplating the possibility, I wanted to tag along.  After all, what do younger siblings do best if not tag along behind the "big kids"?

After arriving on the island we drove to the northern end where the infamous 1000 Step Beach is.  The small hand-painted rock on the side of the road that indicated we were indeed at the right place was tricky to spot, but between my brother's memory, the assortment of vehicles parked alongside the road overlooking the beach, and the bright though fading yellow rock with "1000 steps" in view, it was apparent this was the place.

It was surreal to finally be here - in this place I had only heard about in oft-repeated stories and shared memories.  These were tales I had heard throughout my childhood, but which, for the first 48 years of my life, had no visual place to land in my experience other than in my imagination.

After all, this was the place where my father, seeking shade from the relentless sun, spent an afternoon under a scrubby little tree where all of him but his feet managed to escape the rays that scorched his feet turning them a bright and painful red.  It was also the place where my brother was "lost" as he played happily and alone in the ocean out of view of my parents.  After some time of searching in vain for him, dad began to conclude that the inevitable and unthinkable must have occurred.

Yet, here I was, walking down those "1000 steps" with the ocean in view and the multitudinous coral beneath my feet, and it felt oddly familiar to me.  In part, it felt familiar because of all those many stories I've heard through the years, but it was also recognizable to me because in my childhood my mother had on display a large wooden mixing bowl filled with shells and coral from Bonaire.  I regularly played with the various shells, feeling their differing textures, shapes, and sizes and "listening" to the sound of the ocean in the large conch shell that was among her collection.  As I walked on that beach and swam in the ocean last Tuesday, I saw in their native context the shells and coral rocks that were part of my own childhood in ways I could not appreciate until that moment.

It was a moving moment of "belonging" and "connection" to this particular family and this unique history that was both not mine and very much mine.  Isn't life like that?  The juxtaposition of the places where we feel both part of and apart from the larger story of humanity is fundamental to our experience as humans.  We may or may not be aware of the tension inherent in the paradoxes that confront us on a daily basis, but they are no less present for our lack of awareness.

Much later that same day I was wandering through the streets by myself and taking pictures of tropical flowers that struck me as beautiful and reminded me of my mother, an avid gardener who regularly said that her favorite flower was whichever one she was looking at in any given moment.  I recognized and could identify many of the plants I saw including this hibiscus and bougainvillea, and once again I realized that my mother carried Bonaire as a part of her in ways I did not know as a child and could not have understood until now.  I never considered that her love of these particular plants, which are not native to the hills of East Tennessee, was probably due in large part to the years she spent living in a tropical paradise and the connections she made with the flora of that special place she called home as she and dad were raising their own three young children.

Although there were many moments during my hours on Bonaire that made an impression on me, perhaps the greatest gift I received from this sibling trip was a deeper, richer, and more felt experience of belonging and connection to this place and by extension this family thanks to my mom's subtle but very impactful ways of bringing bits of Bonaire into my childhood in ways that made it recognizable to me all these years later without ever having been before.

Thanks, Mom, for sharing with me the gift of belonging to this larger family story in ways I could not have imagined.  Thanks, Dad, for making this trip possible by your careful management of your finances through the years and the money that enabled us all to go on your dime.  I'm grateful today that I can see, feel, and experience with more depth this part of my family history, and I am growing in my lived sense of connection as a result.