There are seeds buried in the plain of childhood which later bloom into the pathways one takes in life.  One such seed took root during the weekends I spent with my mom in Cincinnati, Ohio; a fact I didn’t realize until many years later when I started sniffing my way like a hound down all those pathways.  Then I came back to goetta and eggs, to surly waitresses and diners, to scrappy indie movie theaters and heavy mugs of hazelnut coffee, to the hills plunging into the jumbled maze of Cincinnati and to my Mom, elegant with her soft hazel hair and her doe eyes in her thirties, caught in a beauty she did not quite know what to do with which she seemed to be both pulling back from and marveling at, ghost-like and unsure.

I go back to my own eager blue eyes and my spinning mind, hungry with the need to figure out how the world worked so I could explain it to the clueless adults around me.  I scoured my Mom and her Cincinnati world with particular fascination.  She belonged to the real world of adults, not the parent world of adults, and she was the closest I could get to that wider adult world.  At “home,” in Columbus, there were no R movies, no Oreos (only when camping – a fact which could spur another exploratory essay about the roots of my current love for the smell of tents and summer mornings in the woods), no leaving of unwanted carrots on one’s plate, and certainly no cans of Sour Cream And Onion Pringles washed down with peach spritzers, the “meal” I long associated with adult freedom in Cincinnati.

My mom lived on a street called Fairview Avenue, which was a sort of false dead end.  Instead of coming to a definitive stop, it horseshoed around at an overlook which was obscured by fluffy green broccoli trees in summer but in winter became a classic Midwestern vista, an industrial city puffing beneath a gray sky, edged by a curving line of river.  After the horseshoe the street met a cross street that plummeted downhill towards downtown.  So it was a dead end with an escape route.  Cincinnati city buses used to come and linger for awhile at the overlook.  The bus drivers smoked cigarettes with their elbows resting on the metal guardrails.  I used to sneak glances at them out of the corner of my eyes, riding in circles on my purple bike with the purple streamers and the purple bell.  (When I was five or six, my mom and I once stayed up until three in the morning, a virtually incomprehensible hour at that age and one that made me feel as if I’d ventured into a tenuous netherworld, painting my room a dark lilac purple).

The Columbus-Cincinnati distinction was edged out little by little as I grew older.  My parents divorced when I was one, but lived in the same city until I was four.  Then, my dad, stepmom, younger brother and I moved to the countryside in Indiana, to a sprawling farm of forests and fields where we were free to gallop and roam around the land.  I loved it there, and declared myself depressed with weighty certainty when we left.  The shuffling back and forth to Cincy began in Indiana, but really took hold when we moved to Columbus, Ohio when I was nine.  I was moving to that increasingly aware in-between stage, not as perceptive as a teenager but not so inured to the swirling of the adult world as a five or six year old.  That was when Cincinnati became more than where-mom-lived; it became a center of exploration, of travel into hipster thirty-something Cincinnati and along the inchoate edge of adulthood.

In Columbus, I had my stable household, my community, my dos and don’ts.  There was my 9-year old place and the limits and norms of that place.  Cincinnati was something else entirely.  Cincinnati – and I conjure it up as that final subtle descent on I-75 when the car felt like it was picking up momentum, being magnetized and drawn towards the distant bristling city with its green clumps of trees and faint gauzy skyline– was open terrain.  I didn’t have a set role there.  I wasn’t “a kid” and my Mom was a different kind of mom, a mom without the normative expectations of kid life.  My mom used to say it was my weekend vacation, coming down and staying with her.  It was more than a vacation –it was the first time I traveled.  Those weekends were my anticipatory ventures into adulthood and into the distinct, compelling state of awareness that comes with travel.

My mom was the center of this world, and I viewed her not only as a mom but as a Katherine Hepburn-esque idol, beautiful, graceful, always thinking about something relevant and meaningful, always carefully searching for a thought in a book or through the panes of a window in winter.  Her cheekbones, high and delicate and giving her a certain innocence, would rise when she was interested in something, and her laugh was incredulous in a sweet, genuine way.  Her house was dotted with wry and defiant statements about the female body or one’s outlook on life.  They were clipped from magazines or newspapers and stuck on doors and windows, where they acquired age and a certain worn fondness, old truths in the back of her mind that ceased to be mantras and became an inextricable part of the fabric of her worldview.

The walls of the Fairview house were graced with scarves and necklaces.  My mom collected both, although collect might not be the right word.  She accumulated both in a casual, undirected way, the way snow accumulates gently in drifts over time.  She wasn’t greedy or materialistic, lusting always after more exotic and exclusive stuff.  She simply loved scarves and they seemed to breeze into her life, gifts from the men interested in her or things she picked up here or there.  I own many of them now ; she gives them to me when I visit her.  Now they are the worn magazine mantras taped to the walls; she no longer wears them.  They have become part of the framework of an old self, one she began to move away from many years ago.  She gives them away with a touch of regret, remembering how they hung in the Fairview house, its smell, its loneliness, the searching self that lingered there.  They still smell like her, the softness of very subtle perfume, cloves, old books, dark wooden drawers opened after long spells of abandonment.

The necklaces were more lively.  I could never manage to wear them as I could wear the scarves and to this day can rarely pull off jewelry.  I loved exploring them tongue-in-cheek, though, putting on elaborate pseudo-Shakespearean plays with my friend Claire in slip dresses and heavy necklaces with metal teardrops and intricate clasps.  I ran my fingers through them, enjoying the clinking and chiming as they intertwined and shimmered.

If Mom was the center of Cincinnati and its greatest mystery and idol, the Fairview house was its soul.  It was the bohemian gathering place, the City Lights of Cincy, although only my Mom and I gathered there.  She let me write on the walls with pencil, first simple graffiti, then what I imagined as poems.  The graphite words against a pale peach wall were one of my first aesthetic pleasures.

The stairs creaked.  The floor creaked.  It was impossible to wake up in that house without waking someone else up, so mom was always forced to wake up to my absurdly bright self at 6.a.m ready and hopping for the day.  She eased into it with a mug of tea or coffee and I read Babysitter’s Club books and plotted our “agenda,” a word she always hated.

“Why do we have to have an agenda?” she’d say, half-laughing.  “Why can’t we just see how things go, you know?”

“Well, what are we going to do,” I said, ever practical.  “It’s a plan, not an agenda.  Think of it as a plan.”

My plan would always consist of 8,921 things to do, and after about ten of them my Mom would say, “Enough!  Get me home!”  She’d unwind with a book and I’d eat white cheddar cheez-its in the bathtub, feeling as if I were at the very summit of a traveler’s hedonism.

The agenda is one of the graspable threads I can trace from my early traveling self to the constant restless traveler I’ve become.  I can trace it from Cincinnati to afternoons in Madison coffee shop gardens, sitting outside in the heavy pressing humidity next to an air conditioner puffing cold dead air inside, pouring over guidebooks to Patagonia.  The agenda was and is a route carved through relentless, exhilarating possibility.  I can trace it, too, to Borneo and plotting a route across the island by land, to Jorge saying, “really, can’t we just sit on this beach for a day or two?” as I planned how we’d hitchhike and trek and weave our way on buses through the jungle.

But beyond the concreteness of the agenda the sensory experiences and, more importantly, the stimulating exploration of other places and people and scents and spaces, intoxicated me and created a lasting hunger for travel.  I craved that constant awareness of place and experience, in which every detail counts, everything is valid and interesting and you are simply a consciousness wandering through it trying to be as present as you possibly can.

We would go to Findlay market, where I trailed my mom as she greeted the vendors, who flirted with her and offered lumpy pink grapefruits in weathered hands.  They had red faces, and they were pushy in a friendly way.  She’d demure and recoil, laugh, banter lightly with them, look down at me.  We’d end up buying a grapefruit.  Then we’d wander – the place reeked of animal flesh and cheese and old shoes that had been vigorously sweated in.  In comparison to the tamed existence of schools and parks in Columbus, this was the height of exoticism.  We bought Chinese shoes at a small store that seemed impossibly vertical.  It was only a few feet wide, but the shelves reached jack-and-the-beanstalk style to the heavens.  They were crammed with rough-edged white boxes of shoes.  We measured my progress over the months and years – 36, 37, 38.  I’d always get the ones with the red roses woven on the front in coarse, shiny thread, and mom would get the plain ones, simple black on the outside and white on the inside.  The padding sound they made was strangely satisfying, as if it answered some urge for subtle aesthetic definitiveness.  We’d always get a baguette, gouda cheese, and the-mustard-with-the-seeds-in-it: that grainy, tangy Dijon mustard.  I could eat it by the spoonful, rolling the beady seeds around on my tongue with pleasure.  Mom would cut wedges of baguette and top them with a heap of mustard and a slice of gouda, and we’d sit at the kitchen table not talking, half-smiling.

Cincinnati was a place where I could shed the established me of school and home, of friends and soccer and violin, and be something wilder.  Wilder in the sense that I wasn’t so reined in by an identity linked to established conventions (“You are nine years old and a student at Grandview Heights Elementary School.”)  In Cincinnati I felt like an untethered traveler, running her hand along the hippie fabrics on Ludlow Avenue and taking afternoon strolls through Burnett Woods.  I could eat waffles with strawberries and whipped cream in the morning and people-watch, idolizing the way the twenty-somethings at the hipster bakery flirted and strutted, I could float on my pink inner tube in the cavernous silence of the pool downtown, and pad around the alien and thrilling YMCA full of boisterous, loud, sweaty men and exotic women who wore disco-colored spandex and ponytails on the tops of their heads. I could read my Babysitter’s Club books in a pew at Latin Mass downtown while my Mom absorbed the atmosphere of a church she could no longer solemnly subscribe to, but longed for the way we long for the scents and places of childhood.  These were tendrils of me snaking off towards my adulthood.

This is what travel does – it lets your identity off its leashes, frees it from attachment to one particular place and one particular way of being and being seen while also, simultaneously, making it more potent.  This process – the simultaneous unleashing and strengthening of identity – began in Cincinnati, and has continued in South America, in the South Indian Sea, in Japan, in Oaxaca.

They say, write where you want to be.  I could write pages upon pages about Cincinnati, clawing my way back to those first voyages when I discovered the myriad little thrills of travel.  Foreign mustard, anonymity with a book and a journal in a distant coffee shop.  The Fairview house with the sayings in pencil on the stairs, the chilly attic full of silk dresses.  It has taken me five years of travel to realize that it began there, that was the birth of the insatiable wanderlust and the fount of all ensuing nostalgia.

Nostalgia, of course, is at its strongest where there’s a palpable sense of loss.  Such is the case with Cincinnati.  I grew up.  Adulthood, the glowing sphere I saw around my mom, turned out to be heavier than I thought, more for her than for me.  Just as traveling eventually will lead you into the weightier realities of place, the poverty and the resentment and the politics, so growing up leads you into the rising-falling terrain of adulthood.  The older I got, the more I could see that the lurking corners of those coffee shops, the cold winter light in the kitchen, the closed off, condensed smell of old warm wood in the attic, the scarves and necklaces, the words on the wall, were shot through with loneliness.  There was a lot of loneliness in those years; that was the undertone of adulthood that I did not pick up on.  I can see it now in the way mom concentrated when she wrote in her journal at times, and the way she looked out the window over a mug of coffee or lost her train of thought.  A few years ago she moved away from the Cincinnati I knew on Fairview Avenue.  Cincinnati changed; after the riots of 2001, which imposed a curfew on our old neighborhood, the city began a “renovation” plan that included bringing in bland-faced chain stores and demolishing the diners and used bookstores we’d gone to for years.

Clifton now is a university district like one you’d find in the center of any Big Ten campus, college sweatshirts and cheap bars offering liters of Bud, dull, dime-a-dozen coffee shops with lamps and plants, Chipotles and Potbellys.  Ludlow Avenue remains the same – there is a coffee shop there that reminds me of my first forays into Cincinnati, of the time when it still felt wild.  There, you can sit at a rickety table in a dark corner sipping coffee and looking at haphazard postcards taped to the walls.  There, that old fire of travel sparks up in me again, and I remember how it all began.