MY ACCOUNT

January 31

Hi mum,
 

I’m trying to figure out whether I’m expecting a response from you. I guess part of the problem is that I don’t even really know if you’re getting these.

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But I know that if you are, you’d probably be wondering about Nora’s father. There’s not much to that story, though. We met soon after I started life on my own. He was working as a fisherman and made deliveries to the restaurant where I work, but it was a temporary job for him, to keep him connected to the water and to keep his bank balance afloat. At the time, he was near finishing his studies to be an oceanographer. He’s always lived by the sea, and seemed to have been born with an obsession to learn more about it. It was that passion that drew me in, I think.

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We weren’t romantically involved, though, and I didn’t realize I was pregnant until he’d left for his first real assignment. I let him know as soon as I could get word to him, and by that point, Nora had already arrived. He came to meet her, brought her lots of gifts, and made sure that we had everything we needed, and still does. But he’d never really wanted to be a parent, and so he’s been in Nora’s life as a friend, as an occasional pen pal.

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We don’t see him much. He’s almost always at sea, and mostly ends up at different ports around the world when he is on land. But it works for us. Nora’s never wanted or needed more from him, and I think she’s rather enraptured by the somewhat nomadic life he leads. I guess she’s inherited the drive for adventure from both sides, really.

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But Nora’s ironically got a more directed sense of adventure and has her heart and mind set on Hawaii. Maybe it’s just because I’ve kept her on the cold East Coast her whole life. She hasn’t travelled at all, actually, and I think Hawaii holds some sort of tropical mysticism for her.

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She’ll soon learn about the various creatures that come with that climate, though! I still remember that winter you and I were in Florida, I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, and we were parked in that beautiful grove. And it got uncharacteristically cold one night… colder than we’d ever experienced in Florida. Do you remember? We were in the sleeper trailer, and all of a sudden, in the middle of that moonless night…  THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! one after another, those loud bangs on the roof of our camper, and we were terrified! We thought we were being attacked! I remember being so scared, but also so awed by your bravery when you got up to see what was what. You had slowly opened the camper door, a butcher knife in hand to protect us, and… THUNK! An immobilized, frozen iguana fell at your feet from its perch in the tree above us. The poor things! (Though I have to admit I’m laughing at the memory!)

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The temperature had dropped so quickly and so low that night that those cold-blooded creatures had been partially frozen, unable to move their limbs, couldn’t even hold onto their branches! And one by one they fell onto the top of our camper. That was a long night! We couldn’t even move out of the grove because you were worried we would crush the ones that had fallen to the ground.

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When I remember times like that, I do sometimes miss adventure, the stories that adventure brings. The memories. But I’ve loved the stability of staying put. I love the reliability of the seasons on the East Coast. I love knowing what to expect, when to expect it. That every October, the leaves will start to change color, creating landscapes of greens, golden yellows, bright orange, and burning reds. By mid-November the trees will be bare, the autumn wind having chased them away, creating clumpy piles of crunchy brown leaves that can scatter with the breath of a whisper. That December brings frigid winds, and big, fat snowflakes that stick to your hair like sparkling crystals.

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And the smell of the cold and the snow here… I love it. The wind blows in across the sea, carrying with it that briny, salt-water smell. And when it reaches land, it picks up the scent of peppermint and becomes an icy funnel, shaking up the salt on the road, skittering it to and fro and making the snow dance like a whirling dervish. When you get caught in that kind of gust, it just… it pulls the breath from your lungs, and then just as suddenly the air is calm and the snow merely whispers as it drifts gently across the road. It makes you wonder if it was always calm and you got lost somewhere for a moment, in a white funnel flurry of salt and peppermint.

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I used to worry that my need for this stability, this anchor, was weighing Nora down, keeping her grounded in a place when she wanted to explore and adventure and roam. That I’ve essentially locked her down with me, done the reverse of what you did. Maybe that’s why I’m prepared to let her fly off on her own now, when she’s had so little experience, because I don’t want to hold her back from what she wants for herself.

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In some ways, I think I envy her purpose. She knows what she wants, she knows what she wants to do and what she wants to learn, and she knows where she wants to go, where she wants to be, and how she wants to be. Maybe me staying put after I hid wasn’t even about wanting stability. Maybe it was about me losing my nerve, losing my purpose, losing any sense of who I wanted to be. After Nora came, I just had to adapt.

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And now it’s because of her that I think I’m ready to find my purpose. Not just ready to find, actually. I think maybe I have found it. I’ve started working on a cookbook… but it’s not going to be just a collection of recipes; it’ll also feature stories from our Salt food truck days, with an informative index of the different salts we learned about, experienced, and collected on our travels. And while I know it’s been so long since I’ve made contact, and I’m aware it may not matter to you now, I’d like to share this experience with you, even if it’s just me writing to you about the process. Who else would really understand it, after all… it was just you and me on that truck, all those years.

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The day I left that life behind, when I hid, I literally put everything I had from those days in a box and packed it away. Recipes, notes, maps, ideas… anything I took with me, it’s all in there. I haven’t even looked at it in nearly 20 years.

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But it’s time now to open that box. I’m ready.

 

I’ll write again soon.

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With love,

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Beatrix