We left early Saturday morning after a great weeks-long flurry of activity to prepare for Dalia. Getting Dalia’s room ready (emptying it out first, which meant spreading our office all over the house). We cleaned her room, painted it (lemon-drop yellow), and began to fill it with a few of her things: a crib, which Calder and dad assembled, which is akin to activating one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions, for which we had to manufacture our own parts since crucial parts were missing), blankets and crib sheets, a picture of Dina, Tal, Henry and Calder which Calder hung in the crib for Dalia to gaze upon; setting up a high-chair, a stroller, safety gates, a cat door, a rope handrail to climb the stairs, and a few safety latches here and there. Hanging a painted scroll with her name—Hu Dong Ling—in Chinese characters, which Dina had made when she was in China in November; filling the crib with stuffed animals, hanging mobiles, painting chests of drawers, retrieving old books and toys of Calder and Henry’s (Calder particularly likes discovering his old trinkets and playing with them again); and inventory-ing all of the clothes we have been given or collected.
Dina was wildly busy pulling all the difficult final details together, and it is true, Eisenhower and General MacArthur undoubtedly had someone like Dina planning the Invasion of Normandy. In the last days—visiting the bank (again), Toys’R’Us, Walmart (ahhh!), appointments, checking all flights on the old internets, working out final details with the travel agency and the adoption agency, packing, packing and packing. It is not that we have to take a lot; but we do have to pack for the winter weather of Gansu Province (something like the weather in Vermont now—roughly equivalent geographically to our upper plains states), as well as for the hot summer tropical weather of Guangzhou, in the south, and more difficult, packing for a little girl we have only seen in pictures. And then more packing, organizing of notebooks, strategic placement of all necessary objects, (stacking cups, sippy-cups, toy frogs, cardboard books about puppies and kittens and farm animals, photos and gifts for the orphanage), disbursement of weight, etc, until, finally on Friday night at mid-night, we have it done.
(This is all done while squeezing in a rock concert, Henry’s band’s first gig at the Ripton Community House, between the end of Tal’s last day at school and our bedtime)!
Up again then at 3:30 a.m. The half-moon is out over the trees, it’s 15 degrees in Ripton. Lugging bags down the hill over the crusty corn snow. Ginger, grandmother to be, is waiting to take us to the Burlington airport. In the dark of the back seat I did one last task—the set-up of the ever necessary but eternally infernal spanking new car-seat. Car-seats, medieval in conception, Again, adjusting it to size for a little girl we’ve yet to hold.
In Chicago we found our gate to Shanghai, and once there, China felt closer. The waiting area was filled mostly with Chinese travelers; Cantonese and Mandarin conversations all around us; Tal’s propensity to eavesdrop while in public is stymied, since he knows only about ten words of Chinese, while Dina can, if she so chooses, have a field day listening in to everything.
On the plane I watch the electronic map on the back of the seat rest which shows our minute by minute progress. It has been nearly four years since Dina and I began the journey of getting a child together. Now that years-long journey is shown in measurable minutes and altitude and geography—truly, these are the last distances to pass over. Up from Chicago, over the Great Bear Lakes, Winnipeg and Edmonton, over the Queen Elizabeth Islands, over Fairbanks and Juneau, over the Bering Sea and the International date line—truly, into another time— crossing over Siberia over spectacular mountains, the Verkhoyanskiy range, and the Aldan Plains—uninhabited, stretching out into invisibility, and below us frozen white expanses seen through the porthole, nothing but white cracked ice from 34,000 feet, 551 miles per hour, 3 mile per hour tail-wind, plus a great flood of loving good wishes behind us.
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