Finding Home

He’s wearing a pair of sandals, faded brown shorts, and a short-sleeved white linen shirt, open at the collar. I want to remember my father as he was that day, during the summer of my eighth year, standing behind me, his arms wrapped around my small frame, showing me how to properly hold a mach Far From Home ete. The palms of my hands are sore from trying to grip the wooden handle. He is laughing and his breath smells like coffee and sugar cane. We’re in a large, brambly cane field off a nearby road into Port-au-Prince. The air is filled with the salt of the ocean. The sun is fierce, and around us there is silence--save for the throaty bass of his voice, heavy with an accent he cannot lose. As I pull my arm back, ready to take a swing at a thick stalk, his smile widens, and we are both happy.
My mother often tells people how, when I was a baby, my father, worried that I might be lonely while my mother slept, would keep me company by taking me on walks throughout our apartment. On hot summer nights, he’d take me out and through the neighborhood surrounding our apartment complex. I ache to even imagine him doing this--the beauty of it.

My father and I have always struggled to understand each other. In my experience, fathers have dreams for their daughters and daughters inevitably fail to live up to those dreams....