Invisible visitors

I was just in Chicago for a few days with my daughter. To sit on the couch together and just catch up, catch the nuances, catch the details. These are moments I live for.  I always feel a pang when other moms talk about their grown kids just stopping by to visit. They have their kids (and eventually, grandkids) close by. Mine are far away. I take the visits when I can.

And when they need a home to return to, when they are released from their studies, I can't provide even that now. Philip talks about living in a dorm for the summer, or a trailer, or in an "extended stay hotel." A hotel! Not that he couldn't handle it. He can. He will. But still...

He reminds me of those Arkansas workers who came to Niagara years ago to scrub Smithville's PCB dump, a job Robert shared with them twenty-five years ago, when we were first married. He would describe for me how he wore a Tyvek suit and mask and stand for 15 minutes at a time in front of the fiery furnace that burned the PCBs and passed the job to the next guy before his body overheated. And he described how he had to scrub the roof of the structure clean, standing high up on a platform, cleaning off the cancer inch by inch. Who knows what risks he took, along with all those Arkansas migrant men, cleaning our ground water of poison. 

And when they were done, my husband came home to me in our basement apartment, and the Arkansas men went home to their hotel rooms and their fast food and their southern accents. My son will be like them, taking his Oaxacan-Ontarian-Texan culture with him wherever he goes. Will someone invite him home for lunch? Will someone notice a stranger? Did we notice those men from Arkansas? There was one of those men who had a family of seven with him. We met them at church and invited them home to dinner. They were surprised. They didn't often get invitations for such a big family. Later we visited them in Arkansas in their new-to-them southern fix-up home, with its deep, covered wrap-around porch, complete with porch swing, To Kill a Mockingbird style. 

How hidden, often, are the strangers in our land. My son joins their ranks sometimes. I'd house him in his own home for the summer, if I could. He's competent but, still, he's just nineteen. May someone else befriend him wherever he goes this summer--him and all those just like him, all those mothers' sons caught in life's migrations.