Parent's Visit, Pt. 2: Errachidia

I arrived at the hotel at nine fifty, and told the taxi driver that my parents would be out quickly, and that they promised that they would be fine this morning. After all, they had only arrived at two o'clock that morning, and who wouldn't want to wake up less than eight hours later after spending thirty-six hours on a series of planes and in a series of airport terminals? I walked through the lobby and into the main courtyard, where the pool greeted me. I looked into the pool for a moment; it was lined with blue tiles and the rippled reflected in them, sending waves of bright yellow cutting across the bottom of the pool.

At the back of the pool was a small cabana lined with drinks that I promised myself I would utilize at some point during my parents' stay. I left the main courtyard and walked down the small walkways covered not with buiding but with roses that had been trained to form an arch overhead. The bushes that lined the walkways were rosemary, and I immediately thought of the year's worth of dinners I had missed from David. The rosemary combines with the roses to form a pungent aroma of sugary and savory. The combination was very successful at keeping flies away, it seemed.

I arrived at my parents' door and knocked. And then I waited.

and waited.

and waited.

Finally, I pulled open my phone after a few minutes of waiting and called some volunteers to ask if they wanted to hang out with my parents at all. The door opened after a few minutes of me standing out there. My mom was disheveled from just waking up. It was the first morning in Paris all over again.

"We haven't even taken a shower yet." My mom said.
"Just put on the same clothes you had on yesterday."
"What?"

It was at this point that I realized the main difference between me, a volunteer, and my mom, a tourist. Fortunately, they agreed, and within a few minutes we were in the taxi with me to get into the town center. Later that afternoon, we met up with D_____, who invited us to his house for snacks and to see the casbah with his family was from. In an hour, we were in another taxi, on our way to the small village outside of Errachidia. We walked through the remains of the casbah. Then, my mom spoke of a dream that she had.

"You know, I had a dream that one of us came across a snake. It was a cobra. So we need to watch out."
"All of the snakes in Morocco are poisonous," D_____ said, "So we may not want to find them."
"Oh." Mom replied.

I had walked over to the edge of the casbah at this point, and looked out an old window at the fields that stretched beyond the horizon. D_____'s family has tilled the soil of this land for generations. I thought. I still find it so amazing at how deep the roots of families in Morocco go. Moroccans can trace their lineages all of the way back to time immemorial. Technically, with the advances of genealogical sciences, anyone can trace their families back to whenever they want. but it's not the same. Yes, my family's roots have been traced back to include Cherokee, Hungarian, Irish, Welsh, and even Roma ancestry, but it's only on a piece of paper; they're names, only names, apparitions of people who once existed and whose commonality I share only by DNA, not by any true family history or true connection.

It is this that I envy with Moroccans, and most other countries, as well. Most other countries are a monolith of one ethnicity or identity, making the search for a family history much easier. America is a combination of races and ethnicities. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to be American; I'm happy that I live in America, and that I have access to all of the benefits that entails. But America's roots are fibrous; we are spread out thinly and shallowly. The roots of Moroccan identity are like the tap root; they dive deep into the darkness of the earth, making it immovable, sturdy, dependable. It was at this point that I realized that I want that. I want roots. I want to be able to tell my children who we are, where we come from. I want to pass along my granny's quilts, my grandmother's afghans, my mom's chinaware. I want them to have the tangibility of their existence in any object possible.

It was also at this point that I realized that I was being watched.

Technically, it is called the Macrovipera deserti, but most people simply call it the desert adder. I know that this is the species because I was one foot away from its body. Two things surprised the group, which consisted of me, D_____, M_______, my mother, and Joe. One, if jumping backwards were an Olympic sport, I'm now certain that I could at least make some sort of qualifying round. Two, my parents realized that whenever they hear the high pitched shriek of a girl, they can include me in the list of possible sources. In the distance, dogs began to bark in response to the high frequency sound waves emitting from my lips. The snake remained motionless.

"I knew it!" My mom yelled, "My dreams are prophetic."

My grandmother once talked about us being part of the medicine man tradition of the Cherokee. That, combined with the druids of the Celts of Wales, and the gypsy Roma, made me support my mom's hypothesis. However, at this juncture, I felt it more important to simply back away. D_____'s reaction at this juncture, however, was to throw rocks at it to make it go away. Fortunately, I was able to back away from it without it even acknowledging my existence. At that point, I was willing to embrace fully the Irish part of my heritage.