During my senior year in high school I got on a plane for the first time, destination: Spain. Thirty years later, I vividly remember sitting at the kitchen table doing homework while my mom made dinner and mentioning to her that the trip had just been announced. I had no motive in sharing the news; it was something other people did and never occurred to me that I might go. Without missing a beat, my mom said, “Why don’t you go?”
I went.
This morning I sent an email to a couple who live in Spain I met last year while in Germany. With a few keystrokes and clicks, a photo taken by a Pennsylvania woman in Germany, immediately arrived in Spain. My teenage self could never have imagined it in the same way that said girl never dreamt of seeing the world until one typical Tuesday night her mom gave her that world with four simple words.
I set out to write about how incredible technology still is to me although I take it for granted as much as the next person, demanding faster speeds and more capability. But this post has instead led me to marvel at a woman who had zero interest in travel and yet gave her daughter the opportunity to do just that. I have been missing her greatly these last few weeks; April and May encase both our birthdays, her stage 4 cancer diagnosis and hospitalization, and the second-to-last month of her life. And, of course, Mother’s Day. Although I know she is with me and always will be, the past couple of days I have been wondering if she actually knows what’s happening in my life since she died six years ago.
Three decades later in a different kitchen I send an email to Spain. Things I could have never foreseen are now routine and assumed. If an image can be delivered across the ocean in the blink of an eye, why can’t my mom have 24/7 access to the Sister Rain Channel? After all, that’s not technology, that’s love.
