The pandemic upended my plan to go 50/50 between two homelands. Absence has made me fonder of the resilient place I come from
Snow-capped mountains. Poppy fields and ripe mulberries. Pines older than my family tree. The rooster’s crow at the crack of dawn. Trips to the sea and Sunday markets. Children’s laughter and the sound of drums echoing through the village during Eid. I have not known this version of Lebanon for what feels like a lifetime.
I still have ties to the country, of course. We’d return home every summer to visit my father, Ramy, who still resides there. This arrangement continued until the summer of 2020, when the pandemic effectively shut down any chance of travelling to Lebanon. My brother Ahmad and our father, Ramy, lie on the living-room couch in 2018. Five years later, in Ahmad’s childhood bedroom, my father’s military hat rests on my grandfather’s coatrack; in the guest room purpose-built for the maternal grandparents, there is a portrait of my last living grandparent: my mother Laila’s mom, Suhaila.
The first was a letter from my father, just after they had met when my mother had visited Lebanon with her family. The second was a letter from my mother, not long after giving birth to me in 2002, updating him on both of us. My mother had wanted to be with her parents during the weeks after my birth, and my father couldn’t be away from work for too long.
Clay swirls in an artificial lake and drops fall from the edge of Kfar Helda waterfall in 2023. On this trip, the weather was noticeably warmer, depleting the mountain snow that feeds this region.
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