Bird poop. Muddy shoes. Car accidents. Trees, trees, trees. A dead bird so light you wonder if it's still in the plastic bag you're carrying out to the yard so you can bury it. Coyote standing bewildered in the middle of the road.

But that didn't answer her question. How do I do it?

There are storms that leave you snowbound inside, unable to get to a grocery store miles away. You learn why it is that thunder is said to 'roll' and not just crack somewhere distantly miles above your head. Patches of wicked heat. Brown outs. Black outs. The traffic lights swing asleep above the intersections. Night so blank with darkness the line between earth and sky invisible. Mineral deposits running through your pipes so dense it clogs all the tiny holes that spill water from the rim of the toilet. Trees, trees, and more trees.

I did it with difficulty the first few months. Through the windows of my house, I used to see only the trunks of trees, thick, immovable, stagnant, blocking my way. I mean, my view. They have beautiful names: dogwood, maple, black walnut, hickory, hemlock, cherry. And ivy climbs them. The safe and poison ones too. White peonies open, shedding the black ants that covered them.

I do it by remembering what I left. The cramped space of our apartment in Manhattan. The kitchenette shoved between the front door and the hallway to the bathroom. The one bedroom we shared with our baby daughter. The woman down the block who pumped up an air mattress every night and slept with her husband in the living room because the one bedroom in their apartment served as their twin sons' bedroom. The adults who sat in the playground without children. The ever disappearing sand in the sandbox. The iron and sulfur and sewer smells of the streets in summer. The wind tunnels along the avenues in winter. How the doorways were never wide enough for double strollers.

But every now and then, other memories surface. How I put my baby in a mammoth Peg Perego, and walked through rain, sleet, or snow, walked off my post partum threatening blues to a Music Together class twenty blocks away. In sunshine, I walked to the Central Park Zoo for the 11 AM sea lion feedings, saw the spontaneous dances and mimes by performers all along the paths, ducked into the Plaza Hotel for a bathroom break, let the baby loose in Barnes and Noble or the Disney Store-- all that carpeted space. On rainy days, I walked to the Metropolitan Museum's courtyard exhibits or the Modern's Gardens of Giverny, walked down the block to the 24-hour Duane Reade drugstore for more infant Tylenol when the baby ran a fever in the middle of the night.

And there was food everywhere. The corner fruit seller who selected the best peaches, plums, bananas for me; the French bakery that offered a heel of bread or a side of sliced mango, and that was just for the baby. I could have any kind of food instantly: Thai, Korean, Indian, Peruvian, Irish Pub or Mangia's Italian, corner deli salad, bagels of every consistency; haute cuisine or not; fresh mint tea in small hot glasses. Starbucks was on every other corner-- just for something warm on a cold day or a chair to nurse a hungry baby. There was steak or macrobiotic vegetarian--all within easy reach.

And then I remember again why we moved to the country: September 11th. The ashen mouths and chins of people walking up Second Avenue in the middle of the afternoon. The metal flakes from the black cloud that drifted up the East River two days after the towers fell, as thin as paper and as wide as a human hand. The burning trash can on Third Avenue that could have been a terrorist bomb that had exploded prematurely. The double wheeled dump truck filled with sand blocking the street to the United Nations five doors down from my daughter's preschool. The police and their bomb sniffing dogs.

I remember I was pregnant with our second child.

Our house in the country sat in a dip of a wavy road. It was an hour's drive north of the city; a commutable distance for my husband, and the district had a highly regarded public school system. From my tilted hormonal perspective, the fact that we signed the contract on my birthday was a sure sign from fate that this was indeed the place meant for us. I remember now that we never drove up to see the house or the neighborhood at night. The darkness of the roads, particularly in the persistent fog (from the quaint lake across the street), might have given us pause.

You see, things like that. The lake. It was a wonderful idea that a lake should be across the street from your house. Just that the size of it, the sweep of the road, the location of our house relative to it-- all made the fog that rose more of a hindrance than we had imagined. Or trees. You see, I had always loved those photographs of houses surrounded by trees. The privacy that trees give you from your neighbors. The quality of air that trees provide. The wildlife they are home to. The sanctuary of a leafy bough above your head in the rain. Except that it rained much of the time.

I remember the idea of a driveway nearly made me drool. I don't have to park five blocks from my apartment building, drag my kid into the stroller, and walk with all our gear in the rain? And storage space. I went to a party once where the hostess gave everyone a tour of her pantries.

I remember the idea of trick or treating for Halloween and hay rides out to pumpkin patches and cooking Thanksgiving Dinner in a big kitchen full of family and friends. I remember building a snowman or sledding down a hill.

And then when I'm shopping at the mall and I see women, with young children, looking off into the distance while their children play with a Happy Meal toy, I remember places in the city where you hardly see a mother and her baby--- and the feel of that-- the freedom of it-- the novelty of it-- the loneliness of it so much easier to bear than the loneliness of being surrounded at that moment with fifty mothers in a loud and busy food court. I don't know why that is exactly. The uninspiring décor, the empty materialism all around, the blank look in their eyes, the monotony of similarities in skin and clothes and hairstyle and strollers. This picture is something that I know instinctively-- from television, from my own mother's table at the mall-- the way the husbands or significant partners are all far away in the distant city. By this time, my second daughter had been born, and so we joined this picture, the three of us: a woman still in her maternity clothes, a toddler unable to sit still in a chair, and a newborn wriggling in her car seat Snap-N-Go. And as much as I wear the same clothes with the same hair cut and have the same children's gear, I am different. Not one other mother in that mall is Korean like me. And as much as it makes less difference to me now than when I was a child, I look at my daughters and see what they see: not a world of many but a world of two-- everyone else on the one hand and them on the other.

In the city there are people of all kinds. Young and old, Asian, African, European, Arab, South or Central American, Australian, Caribbean, Siberian-- every part of the Earth, of every religion, visiting or living here, rich and poor, working and studying, looking to do either or nothing at all, together or alone. Happy or desperate or hungry or full. You can see parts of yourself everywhere, every human want and emotion.

And the city has an urgency about it-- that even if you're doing nothing, you feel that you are doing something-- just by being near it, part of the flow of people crossing the street together into oncoming traffic. And the traffic always stops.

Like life. The city is close to the pulse of life. I remember that after Sahra, my older daughter, was born, the first night home, I ran out to the grocery store. And I was appalled to see that everyone else moved on, lived as they had always lived--that here I had undergone a major change and no one seemed to care.

And then, of course, is the other piece of it: what the therapist said. The timing. The reluctant remembering all over again.

Sahra was nearly three years old when we moved to the country, the same age I was when I moved from Korea to the United States. Until then, my grandmother and stepsister were my primary caregivers. My mother worked as a physician, logged long hours at a clinic. My father was away, a physician also-- but away in the army or away in America. I don't remember my grandmother or my stepsister now-- the photos show me clinging to each of their hands. My mother tells me I wouldn't leave my grandmother alone-- insisting on riding piggy back wherever I went. She said I used to pull my stepsister's hair. That day in Seoul at the airport when I was three years old was the last time I saw them. (My grandmother died five years later of malnutrition and my stepsister went back to her birth family.) I fought with my brothers on the airplane for the window seat and, when I got it, fought for the aisle. I cried for the toy television at the Tokyo Airport during our layover. My mother didn't know what to do with me. We hardly knew each other at all. And when I saw my father in New York, I ran in the opposite direction.

Eventually, I learned English from watching "Sesame Street" and "Captain Kangaroo" and forgot most of my Korean. My mother gave up her practice and took care of us children full time. My father settled into a practice in a small Midwestern town. We grew up.

Maybe this move to the country was a remembering for me of my traumatic move to the States. Maybe my daughter's age triggered it. Once, twice, many times my husband came home to find me enraged at Sahra for ordinary toddler antics. How long had I been shouting at her while I clutched the newborn in my arms? Why was getting dinner on the table the most difficult feat of the day? The worst was that I would stop talking to everyone, refused to extend a much-needed hug to a little girl who begged for it. The worst was that I dreamed of driving down a winding road in the middle of the night without the headlights on. The worst was that we went to visit my mother four hundred miles away and, when we arrived, Sahra started crying that she wanted to go home. The crying wouldn't stop. She ran out to the driveway, tried to get back into our car. I carried her kicking and screaming to the lawn, and we both cried on our knees, my arms wrapped around my terrified child. Since our move to the country, Sahra had developed a sudden and irrational fear of other people's houses. She refused to step foot in the houses of friends she had visited many times in the past. I had assumed that her beloved grandmother's house would've been an exception. So there we were in my mother's front yard. Sahra kept saying, "I want to go home". I told her we couldn't go back to our apartment, we had moved. She looked at me as if I were nuts. "That's what I mean, Mama. I want to go to our house." Ten minutes later, my husband and I repacked the car, I hugged my mother goodbye, and we were back on the road driving north. The worst was I cried more the closer and closer we neared our new house that night.

Now, two years later, the country has become familiar ground. I still drive into the city now and again and feel the exhilaration of anonymity and belonging and relish what I eat there. But I come eagerly home to my family in the country. I don't know what exactly made the difference. Maybe time. We're all two years older. The newborn has become a finger pointing toddler in a forward facing car seat. The toddler has become a curious Kindergartener.

Maybe the difference is our second new house which we moved to just recently. One without any trees close to the windows. One right beside a main road that pounds like the ocean's surf with cars in the morning and night.

I watch my daughters run on green acres and feed carrots and apples to the horse next door. They kick soccer balls sky high. They point and giggle at the wild rabbit who lounges outside our door. Together we vacuum and sweep the insects out. Together we gather in a large kitchen to cook our meals. We pile into the car to pick up supplies and visit friends. But it isn't all easy. I can still be found some mornings standing outside alone, filled to the brim with not enough patience for whatever is going on inside with the girls or my husband. But it's easing. Ever so easing. Yesterday, Sahra came home breathless-- thrilled to have ridden bareback on a pony. "I could feel her bones, Mama," she said wonderingly. "A little slippery but good."


--Jimin Han--

Jimin Han's work has appeared in Asian Pacific American Journal, Global City Review, and The NuyorAsian Anthology. A finalist for the Charles Johnson Award in Fiction, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Cornell. She lives in South Salem, NY. She can be contacted by email at jhfsj@aol.com