[new americans]
NEIGHBORS The ends of their scarves danced in the wind. Their brightly colored tunics billowed behind them, a softly rippling swoosh of vivid violet, luscious saffron, and prairie sky blue, giving them the look of a flock of exotic birds about to take flight. I must have driven by this little procession daily. We were neighbors, after all. Yet I didn’t give them a thought until my first week back at work after a particularly great vacation. International travel wakes me up, makes me a little more engaged, a little more curious about the world around me. And this time, the effect clung to me long after my flight landed.
Abbas Jasam, Salima Rashieed and family visit Nolan and Doris Underlee and Wayne and Christy Underlee on the family farm.
I was back home, back to the grind and already frustrated. The world had opened up for me, but now I was right back where I started, smack dab in the middle of a calendar full of appointments, a twelve-hour work day with five minutes to inhale my lunch at my desk, and the constant ping of emails until well after midnight. This is what I was thinking about when I saw—really saw—the women on the sidewalk for the first time. They looked present, engaged, as if they were really seeing the sky and their friends and the kids at the bus stop and not rushing off to the next thing. This is a state of being I could only cultivate on vacation. I was jealous. I wondered who they were and where they’d come from. I assumed they were immigrants because of their decidedly non-western clothing, and the fact that they
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