Coming Home
My birth daughter boards a plane a few days before Christmas and flies across the country, across all the flat wheat lands and mountains and unknown rivers that separate us, flies to that scary one runway airport between the skyscrapers of San Diego and the sea. She will stay with me for five days, stay in the room I'm sitting in now, the room that houses my Avon and computer and favorite books. She will meet her sister and three brothers, two of her aunts and two of her uncles, three cousins, and my dog and birds and reptiles. And we will eat! I will prepare a feast in her honor, the kind my favorite sister calls "Birdie's California Smorgasbord," with six kinds of sushi and spinach lasagna and homemade tortellini with butternut squash filling and a fat turkey with cranberry dressing and so many desserts we'll lose count.
When we sit around the tree and share presents, there will be a large strangely-shaped package for her wrapped in newspaper with a gold bow - my travel guitar, the one I took to Paris and Texas and Ontario, the one I played when I sang original songs at all my sisters' weddings, the one with scratches I know by heart, with the cherry wood rich tone. I'll teach her how to make a C chord, how to tune the strings, how to play her favorite song.
I will call all the girls into my bathroom so full of Avon surprises, and we'll do face masks and 2-step facial peels and foot soaks and gossip about men and women we know, and my favorite sister who cuts hair in the aromatherapy spa in her small red soil New Mexican town will trim our bangs and color our roots. The men and boys will wonder what we do behind that white door, what those waves of girly girl laughter mean, but we won't tell them.
And in January, when my kids are back in school and my birth daughter plays her new guitar on the east coast, when I walk my neighborhood selling Avon, when some new customer asks me a question about my children, asks me "So, Birdie, how many children do you have?" I will have a new answer, an answer I have waited too many damn years to answer.
"I have five children. Five beautiful, smart, lovely, funny children."
9:03:30 AM 
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