when I remember Canada

We crossed the border thirty-odd times on that trip. I know because we counted - that was part of our work, part of our questioning - and because of the hours I remember we sat bored in the van thinking about how long our customs conversation would be. It was a trip about borders, Jim told us, a trip about the liminal space between, this funny line that creates two nations instead of one wilderness. At the time, I had signed up for the trip because I was a bird on the wing, anxious to feel the air against my face. I wanted movement, change, a stepping outside myself. I also loved traveling with Jim and all of his rituals. I loved how we sat next to different people in the van every day, waited to eat until we all had our food at a restaurant, stopped to sketch and write, shared our journals, saved ticket stubs and matchbooks and rarely took pictures, but always talked to strangers.We started in the upper reaches of Vermont that June, while the mosquitos, early in their hatching, kissed our bare knees and skinny arms. One of the girls on the trip wanted us to insist on doing ab workouts every night. She would time us, thirty seconds on each side, in planks and crunches, in strange contortions of high school bodies already too worried about the wrong things. I collapsed every night we did this, exhausted with the fear that they'd figure out that I wasn't really an athlete.We drove through towns built with that invisible line drawn through the houses, along the streets - half in Canada, half in the US - and took a long ferry out to Campobello Island, owned by both countries. We walked along the beach for hours, picking up trash and scuffing our sandals against bits of driftwood. I caught a piece of seaweed on my shoe, and the sky rippled grey and it started to rain. We sat on benches to eat homemade sandwiches, ham and mustard on stale wheat bread, apples. I drank water out of the Gatorade bottle I had saved for the whole length of the trip, because we were supposed to bring water bottles with us and I didn't have a Nalgene.I remember lying in a dark basement bedroom in a home in New Brunswick one night. We were staying with someone who knew someone who knew Jim, the threads of kindness stretching tight over miles and friendships. The older couple we were with spoke French, and I tried mine on them, feeble though it was, making the noises with my mouth, the Parisian "r" perfected but not understood in their simpler Canadian lilt. I felt foolish, trying to sound French in their sweet yellow and green kitchen, as they fed us blueberry muffins and asked us about our hopes and dreams after high school. They didn't need impressing, only to hear the echo of their kindness coming back in our "bonne nuit" and "merci beaucoup, beaucoup." I lay in bed, looking at a small framed picture of the sweet faced Jesus with lambs and children. I looked at the outline of the girl lying in the bed next to mine, asleep in the strange room, and never before have I felt so sure that the lines between strangers and friends is line, dissolving ever andWhen I remember Canada, I hear myself reading Robert Frost's poem to the sweaty sun-kissed faces of my classmates who had not traveled, who had spent their time planting seeds and bike riding to Boston and sculpting or sewing or glass-blowing or putting on a play in three weeks.Something there is that does not love a wall,that wants it down. I hear myself and those words and think - what walls do we carry with us as we go, dear Frost? Where are those invisible lines between the country of our selves, between you and me, between all that we wonder about and all the questions it would take to learn it?Something there is in me, those long days and nights journeying between those countries, asking strangers and friends about border culture, eating sandy sandwiches and listening to Citizen Cope's "Son's Gonna Rise" on repeat, in the becoming of ten high schoolers, in the traveling and the return, that ceased to love a wall.Something there is in me that wonders, even now,must we have such walls?Love,hilary

the sisterhood

I wanted to be Lena. I didn't tell the other girls, who had already assigned themselves characters, and had been kind enough to include me in their imagining. One was most like Lena, because she had the hair and she was good at art. Bridget belonged to our own version of the tall soccer player, who waved her hands wildly as she ran and managed to score four goals in a game. And the third girl was Carmen, the writer, the one who kept the group together and built the home for their hearts and kept the secrets (most of the time) and always had the most beautiful things to say. But The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants has four characters, and they offered me one - Tibby - the mystery, the rebel, the girl with the camera who doesn't recognize herself, who loves fierce, but different. They offered it to me, one of my first invitations to be a part of them, to think of myself as belonging, even if for just the duration of the movie or the week when we cracked the orange cover open and raced through the third book.But I wanted to be Lena. I wanted the big love Kostos had for her - beaming out of the pages. How he radiated in her direction, how he took care of her, learned her quietness and her fear and her joy. I wanted her ability to see into the people she drew with her charcoal pencil. I wanted to be described with celery green eyes and effortless hair. I ached with it - this character I couldn't claim as my own - this fictional person who lived a life I thought I should have.When we drove across the country for the second time, in the darker green minivan, I reread all the books. My sister and I sat behind everyone else, each in the same world at different times. For eight hours, Tibby and Bridget and Lena and Carmen drove with us - stopping for Cokes and pretzels at the gas stations, poking our brothers and being smacked back with the plastic rifle from Wall Drug in South Dakota. We treated the books without care, assuming, like we almost always do, that they will wait for us to come back. That everything waits for us to come back.During those drives I reread the stories and wrapped my seat belt in strange loops around my waist so that I could have my torso free. My parents always told us not to do this. I ate Swedish fish out of a plastic bag stuffed into the cup holder. I was not yet fifteen, then, and I only had my top braces off, which made me self conscious when I smiled. My hair stuck to my head in sweaty summer clumps, and the pictures of that time remind me that I bought one pink shirt from American Eagle that said something about "bee-ing happy" with a picture of a bumblebee splashed across the front. I wore it as some kind of promise to myself that I could be one of the girls, who shopped at American Eagle and wore cute shirts and played soccer like Bridget and could write like Carmen and draw like Lena.I read, and we drove, and the country spilled out in front of us: an abundance of white in the sky, an emptiness on the roads. It must have been there that I gave up the dream of Lena. Somewhere in Nebraska or Iowa, staring at cornfields and hay that reached above my head, hearing nothing but wind through the bleached stalks and the bickering of my siblings and my parents debating buying ham at the next grocery store. I released the dream of her - her celery green eyes, her long effortless hair, her drawing, her love story. It floated out the window, between wishing I had a cowboy hat of my own and finding one in a Walmart in Colorado, and I turned fifteen later that summer.It must be that this is part of the way we learn about ourselves: that we release the dreams of who we might be, free ourselves of the clinging hope of someone else's beautiful self. We let the character we wanted to play float out the window under a Colorado sky, and we buy a cowboy hat and hug our brothers, and let our sister braid our non-effortless hair in two French braids when she asks. We reread the stories no longer anxious to fit ourselves into the small spaces of the words about Lena:because we know there she's only a dream.because we know that we are real.because we'd rather hug brothers and let someone french braid our hair and eat Swedish fish.because we'd rather turn fifteen as ourselves.