New Shores

The sprawling city ahead was so different from where I had grown up. Walking on the paved sidewalk, the air was lighter here and moving constantly, not like the oppressive air at home. On the island, it was never very hot, but the air inland didn’t move. Things were stationary, slow. It felt like nothing ever changed there, the waves lapped at the rocky shores and the whalers shoved their boats out into the icy waters same as always, my father and grandfather among them. Even now, when I knew that things had changed considerably, I couldn’t envision home as any different than I had left it. That was feitico, the magic that God had cast over the islands. As legend had it, a priest had petitioned God to make the island invisible to other sailors, so that the inhabitants could live in peace without fear of the King. Maybe that’s why the air was so heavy—God working his spell over us all.

As I made my way down the sidewalk, I passed the window of a butcher. I had just learned that word, butcher, and I still had trouble with the “R” at the end. My parents spoke English like they spoke their native language, chopping off the end of words or simply trailing off altogether and forcing me to guess their meaning. Most Americans had initially mistaken us for Italians, but the difference could not be overstated. Where the Italians were big and loud and lyrical, we were softer. Ours was a language made to hold sadness, to whisper secrets amongst each other. I had gone to this particular butcher with my mother the week before for lamb, and the small shop had been bustling with weekend shoppers. She had repeated her order three times over to the attendant, in her soft trailing way of talking, and each time the attendant had let out a loud “One more time, missus”. Finally, I had raised my voice and said “Three pounds of lamb shoulder, please sir!” in my best English. As the attendant prepared our cuts, my mother looked at her shoes. Her ears were tinged red.

It was times like that when I wanted to go home. My mother and father with their accents, me with my hairy arms that made the light-eyed Irish girls at school snicker and smirk. Sometimes, the saudade swelled so big within my chest that it pushed out salty tears, and they rolled down my cheeks and into my mouth. The saltiness of the taste which reminded me so much of Faial, of home, made even more tears fall. The cycle continued itself until I was eventually called away by school or sleep or dinner. But now, away from my mother and walking down the street in Somerville, I did not feel this way. At some point since we had fled the eruption, the homesickness had given way to something entirely different—a certain thrill that gripped my gut and propelled my feet ever forward.

I used to think that Horta was big, with all its markets and wide roads. But next to Boston, Horta seemed a small village. There were so many shops here, so many nooks to explore. Even Somerville, as quaint and calm as it was compared to the bigger cities, was easily many times the size of the towns scattered across the Azores. A candy shop run by a jewish couple a few blocks from our small house, a diner with red leather bar stools, a dusty book store and its hidden secrets within. It seemed never-ending. I had taken to exploring on weekends, when my father was too tired to tell me no. I had no money to spend, but it didn’t matter to me. My purpose wasn’t to consume, only to find. Just looking was enough to satiate my mind.

Today, I was not going to the candy shop or the diner or the book store. I smoothed my long skirt with my hands and ran a finger underneath the strap of my school bag. The Americans called these skirts ‘poodle skirts’, although I didn’t entirely understand why. In my hair, I wore one of my mother’s scarves, red and vibrant. Against the dark hair that my parents and grandparents had given me, it stood out like a beacon of my homeland. I walked until my feet felt pure earth underneath them. I had heard someone at school call this place the Old Powderhouse, and in a couple hundred more steps, my eyes grazed a big stone sign that confirmed it. At home, there had been vibrant colors of every kind lining the roads, flowers and trees and the bluest of blues emanating from the sea. Here, the only thing in sight were big towering pines and oaks, old stone pavers littered amongst the greenery. It wasn’t as colorful, but it was beautiful in its own rugged way. I found a big smooth rock, and with a little effort, I perched myself atop its highest point. Casting off my school bag, I could imagine what this land looked like before the big cities and bustling shops.

My eyes drifted shut. For a moment, I was no longer sitting on the Old Powderhouse path, I was no longer in Massachusetts. Our house in the old land appeared in the mists of my mind, the stones of the road, the garden that my grandmother tended. My grandfather sat on a rock, not unlike the one that I was sitting on now, running his thumb over a whale tooth. My fingers moved of their own accord toward the entrance of my school bag, withdrawing that same tooth. He had given it to me several years earlier, before Massachusetts, before the volcano. At the time, it was so big that I had to hold it in two hands. Now, it sat in my palm comfortably. I ran my thumb over it like he had.

As much as I missed the land of my grandfather, the language he passed to me, the whale teeth he brought home, maybe God was trying to tell me something. Maybe it was enough for the island to have existed at all, maybe it was enough that I had called it my home. The feitico was still with me, inside. The spell that was cast all those centuries ago protected the island, yes, but it had also protected us. A salty smell ran itself under my nose. The saudade, the sadness, blossomed into cherished memory. It was no longer only sorrow. Instead, a colorful mosaic of wonder and nostalgia and tears took its place. A relic of the familiar warmth of old times, carried into the bright exciting Now.