DAY FOUR

The email I’ve been waiting for finally arrived. A very long tracking number assures me that my new passport is winging its way to me, destined to land in the mailbox in two days.

My childhood passport remains one of my treasured possessions. Although it hides away in a box at present, I’ve never had the nonchalance to toss it. A yellow-tinged photo of small, blond me looks seriously at the camera (because you aren’t supposed to smile, they say). In advance of my family’s move to Clermont-Ferrand, France, we children obtained our first passports, which felt important and official. The excitement of the passport was second only to the Walkman and choice of cassette tape my dad purchased for each of us. I won’t call it a bribe, rather a bit of an advanced apology. Moving to France in the 1980s, with little time for language preparation and in the middle of our school years, stretched us all in ways only fellow pre-internet expats can understand (and the re-entry into American culture at an awkward age was … bumpy).

But, the passport. That gold-stamped blue cover started out with crisp, watermarked blue pages promising adventures to come. I credit my amazing parents for the filling up those pages during our tenure in France. Back then, each country still stamped your passport with every border crossing. A quick flip of those pages marks a series of memories that changed my life forever. Our time both living in and traveling across Europe taught me adaptability. Grit. French. Curiosity. Appreciation of the new and deep appreciation for the familiar on the rare occasion we encountered it (a glass of ice with a Pepsi or Coke, for one). I could (and perhaps will) write novels about our experiences living in France. Those memories and life lessons live in invisible ink behind multilingual stamps across those passport pages.

After returning to the States, I took many opportunities to travel abroad. My most recent trip out of the country found me meeting up with my mother in an apartment in Paris, in celebration of a milestone birthday (I should write about my dad, having recently watched the film Taken, sternly warning me about strangers as I navigated alone from the airport to the apartment, despite my being well out of desired age range for human trafficking). After that hallmark trip, life did as it often does and overtook plans, dreams, and TIME.

Last fall, out of the blue, my mom and I decided it was time for another trip abroad. It has been too long, we decided. We’d been to New York a few times together, and she traveled periodically to Europe and Israel with my dad or others. But she and I, together in Europe? Too long.

When I say too long, I mean actually too long. I’ve obviously had several passport renewals since my first. As I started thinking through where I’d stashed my passport since our last move, I realized that the hallmark trip to Paris was 12 years ago. Twelve years! And I had renewed it a few years before that. With that passage of time, my passport was clearly expired. By years.

I needed a moment to grieve the fact that I had been living restricted from the ability to pursue an adventure abroad, albeit unknowingly. How could I have let that happen? It was a reality check for me. I love adventure. My heart yearns toward ocean waves as though I’d been a sailor on the high seas in some other life. Trains lull me into daydreams of what I might find a few miles down the track. In my children’s younger years, when storms would come near and the sky was “going green,” we would jump in the car (which they affectionately called the “Mommy 5” – my Stormchasers fans will understand) to see how close we could get. It’s not that I missed out on travel I should have done. It’s that I missed out on maintaining the option to, whether exercised or not.

With that in mind, although the trip this year is just my mom and me, I asked my husband to renew his passport as well. Is it likely we are headed out of the country together any time soon? No. Do I want that option available? I do. He immediately agreed, understanding my slightly zany reasoning, as he usually does. We spent the last morning of 2024 at the passport office (yes, New Year’s Eve … you take the appointment you can get). Since then, I have been living with anticipation.

The very long tracking number assures me that my new passport is winging its way to me, destined to land in the mailbox in two days. So now, for two days, I live with anticipation, almost fulfilled.