Driver, take me somewhere stuffy
On humidity, lineage, and the eternal bond to our origins
The desert heat is my biggest adversary, yet I live in it. I prefer the drops of humidity where my hair takes on a wild form without tangling. Barefoot, wearing a big tee, with mosquito repellent and sunscreen layered on every inch of my leg skin, it reminds me of summers somewhere I love—Jamaica.
When summer rounds the bend, all I want to do is escape to it, a place I’ve been revisiting since birth and my maternal grandmother’s first home. I feel a profound connection to it and its stifling humidity.
In a sense, I existed in Jamaica long before my birth. Trace it back to my grandmother's earliest days, and I journeyed with her. She carried all the eggs that would become my mother, and my mother carried me. The island's essence is very much a part of me.
“All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as en egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
― Layne Redmond, When The Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm
I was with my grandmother as she ran through the Jamaican heat on her parents' farm and swam in the clear, warm waters of the Caribbean Sea. I accompanied her through milestones, rebirths, and deaths, feeling, absorbing, and experiencing every moment of her life as if it were my own—all woven into the fabric of my existence long before I took my first breath.
No wonder I crave this unfavored climate; it brings me back to her, back to my mother, and back to myself as a child—barefoot, in a big tee, with hair that took on a life of its own. The humid air is like an ancestral melody—a tangible tie to the land that shaped my grandmother's life and, consequently, mine.
When people ask, "What place would you return to?" my quickest and truest answer is always Jamaica. I want to believe that there is a place like it for most people. Wherever you move or travel in the world there is a place or person connected to you by an invisible string. However remote, inconvenient, or unfamiliar a destination may be, the connection remains—an anchor of belonging.
Returning to Jamaica or my grandma’s house (ironically in Jamaica, Queens) and reacquainting myself with the humidity that lingers in the air brings me an immense sense of peace and gratitude. Feelings I’ve known through my formative years and every summer on both islands. Feelings that I always seek in life.
I hope that you also find those small connections in life's tapestry.