And when I’m with my husband, I miss America.

Woburn, MA – May 2020

As I wrote last week, at the end of 2019 I moved back to the US after living in Jordan for four years. I moved in with my sister and other housemates in Medford, MA, a suburb of Boston. About two months later, I married Raja (in Boston!), the pandemic upended everything, and Raja and I got stuck on opposite sides of the planet when, after our wedding, he traveled back to Amman just before Jordan indefinitely shut down all commercial flights in and out. I wrote this piece in the early days of COVID when we’d been separated for six weeks.

I am impatient to have Raja with me in America.

I spent the past while being with Raja in Jordan, and missing America. Now I’m living in America and missing Raja. When will he be able to come?

This morning I drove out to Horn Pond and walked around it. It was one of those shimmering unbelievable mornings. I listened to Tallest Man on Earth on the way over: When the Bird Sees the Solid Ground. The guitar parts jump and skitter around and the trees shine in the sideways light.

Medford gives way to Woburn gives way to Winchester, and the houses get fancier and fancier as you go. Shiny cars, manicured lawns, bright flowering pink trees, women out walking their little dogs in lulu lemon leggings. I wish I had the two million or so it would take to buy a house in that area. It is beautiful.

Grove street turns into Church street, Pond street spills out onto Lake street. I parked there, next to the pond. The wind was so strong it had kicked up white caps on the normally still water. There were police barricades blocking off the parking lot, and signs along the street. Some said No Parking – Temporary Police Order, and some said Practice Social Distancing. I parked by one of these, and set off on the path around the pond.

The air itself seemed to sparkle as I walked. I came across a bird that had a seven-part song as his little chirp. I came across bird watchers with their full camouflage and long-lens cameras. Sun and wind, or shade and stillness.

I sat on a sun-soaked bench. I noticed that the pond seemed to stretch far back from where I was sitting, but if I were to watercolor it, the whole bottom half of the painting would be green grass, and just around the middle, there would be a thin strip of horizontal blue.

This is exactly what I missed all the time when I lived in Jordan. Perhaps the glow will wear off when I’ve been back in the US for longer, but I still delight in the sight of green grass. On the sides of the bike path, blanketing the park down by Boston Avenue and Mystic Valley Parkway, growing everywhere fresh and lush and green this May.

I still remember how I would sometimes get into my monthly rental car and drive from Weibdeh, my neighborhood in Amman, all the way across the city to near King Hussein park. I would pull over and park somewhere near the Manaseer mansion after turning left at Khelda circle onto the road that leads to Fuheis. Then I would get out, cross the little sidewalk, and sit on the grass. It was soft and green and densely growing.

For this was the king’s grass, grown and watered to perfection along this one strip of road so he could see it on one of his commutes between palaces. Or so I’d heard.

It would be a nice spot to sit or picnic if it weren’t for the cars flying past, honking at you, and if it weren’t for the fact that the strip of grass was only five feet wide, and that inevitably after 10 or 20 minutes a police car would come by and the officers would tell me that I couldn’t sit on the grass. Mamnou’a ta’adi huun. You can’t sit here.

I would stand and say, oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know, and I’d get back in the car, and drive all the way back across the cement jungle to Weibdeh.

How starved of green I must have been to do that! And here I feast my eyes on green everywhere. How sad this strikes me, that Jordan is starved of grass and green space and here, we take it for granted.

Is simply viewing the color green connected to having lower levels of cortisol? I wonder. Does the population of Jordan – Arizona for that matter – have higher average cortisol levels than the population of the northeast, Midwest, anywhere full of green space?

I’m lucky now to live out at the edge of Boston, so I can easily slip away into the ponds and lakes and forests around it. I’m lucky to own a car and to be able to wake up one morning, see how sunny it is, refuse to sit down at my laptop to apply for more jobs, pick a spot with a pond and wind and sparkly air and flowering trees, and drive to it, and walk there for awhile, and breathe there for awhile (albeit through a mask).

My friends and I would hike and camp and spend time in nature in Jordan too. It was just such a different feeling: the heat of the day filled up our lungs every time we took a breath, and everywhere we looked: rocks and dust that haven’t seen rain in months; a haze in the air; brown and tan and beige.

Sometimes you can get a far off glimpse of the Dead Sea, but it doesn’t even look blue through the haze. Beige, just like the sky. When living in Jordan I always felt homesick for exactly what I did this morning.

Now I’m here, watching the air sparkle over Horn Pond – and homesick for Raja.

***

A note from the other side

The answer to my question “When will he be able to come?” is two years. In the spring of 2022, two years after I wrote this essay, he got his green card. I think if you’d told me the answer then, I would have laid right down on the gravel of the Horn pond path and not gotten up.

At the time I desperately wanted to know the answer to this question – when will he be able to come? – but looking back now from the other side of it all, I’m not sure if knowing the answer at that time would have actually helped me.

More likely, it would have crushed me.

But because the immigration authorities never give you an estimate of how long things will take, we never knew, when we were slogging through it, that his immigration process would take two years. The waiting was just an exercise in going through one day, another day, another day, another week, another month, another year, and then suddenly one day it was over.