I immigrated to the United States on a Saturday night.
May 1st, 2011.
By the following Tuesday, Melvin came home and said he might lose his job.
He did, a month later.
Before any of that unfolded, before we knew what was coming, he needed to retrieve something from Jacksonville, Florida.
We decided to make a road trip of it.
The first of many.
We drove through Washington, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, then down into Mississippi before turning back.
It was eye-opening, to say the least.
As a child, I loved singing.
I sang in school, sang at home, sang wherever I could.
Music made me happy.
For one brief year, when I was eleven, I lived with my father while my mother taught in an American school three hours away.
I saw her once a month.
I was the youngest.
An extension of her.
I missed her every day.
Each evening after school, my father and I would eat a dosa and a gulab jamoon at the same restaurant.
Then we’d ride home on his little motorcycle.
That was about the extent of his parenting skills.
He wasn’t much for conversation.
I was left alone with my missing.
At night, I would cry.
Eventually, my father discovered the most effective solution.
He would play The Sound of Music LP.
I sang every song, loudly, completely.
By the end of it, I was tired, smiling, ready for bed.
Music became comfort.
A way to travel without leaving the room.
A way to visit places I had never seen
and didn’t yet know to question.
One of the songs I loved most was Country Roads.
I sang it for years.
I loved the rhythm, the warmth, the way it felt to open my chest and let it out.
I never once wondered what the words were pointing to.
I didn’t know the places.
I only knew the feeling.
So there we were, driving through Virginia on that first road trip, when I saw a sign.
Shenandoah River.
I stared at it.
Then yelled, “Shenandoah! Like in the song!”
Melvin hesitated.
“Yeeees…”
Then I noticed another thing.
West Virginia.
The Blue Ridge Mountains.
This could not be a coincidence.
These places were real.
And I was inside the song.
I had sung it for nearly thirty years without ever asking what it was talking about.
And now it was all around me.
I didn’t hear Melvin laughing beside me.
I was too busy discovering the world.
He later told me it felt like watching a five-year-old learn how things work.
That felt about right.
I sang the song on repeat until he nearly drove the car off the road.
I asked a thousand questions.
About exits.
About the I-95.
About motels, rest stops, and signs.
I was learning a country out loud.
On that trip, I saw bales of hay for the first time.
They remain special to me.
I saw water wheels.
Stayed at a campground.
Met Melvin’s sister, Gale.
Sat through a proper American storm.
I learned there really was a ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’,
just like in the song.
I fell in love with the Southern accent.
I learned to drive our tank of a car on the I-95.
America revealed itself slowly, generously.
To this day, I notice things others overlook.
The immaculately kept grass.
The rolling fields.
The vastness.
I experience this country through immigrant eyes.
And I do not take it for granted.
One afternoon, driving through the countryside, I saw a picnic table under a tree in someone’s yard.
It looked unreal.
Like something from a movie.
For a girl coming from India, this was not ordinary.
It was not small.
A picnic table meant land.
Space.
Leisure without apology.
A life where time could be wasted under a tree.
I turned to Melvin and said,
“Maybe one day we’ll have a picnic table under a tree in our own home.”
He said, simply,
“Sure.”
We drove on.
A few months later, we moved to India.
We stayed three years.
Then we returned to the United States in 2014.
Life unfolded.
Quietly.
Patiently.
One year later, Melvin had a shed.
One of the first things he made was a picnic table.
When he finished, he said,
“Here’s your very own picnic table under a tree, Sweetie.”
I was overwhelmed.
My dreams have never been grand.
They are the kind little girls carry quietly.
Grass around the house.
Trees in the backyard.
A table under one of them.
Sometimes the simplest things bring the deepest joy.
And sometimes love looks like remembering.
I am grateful to this man.
Not only for turning dreams into reality,
but for remembering what they were.