We have this box. It’s purple. It might even have Winnie the Pooh on it, but I’m really not 100% sure. I have no idea how it became THE box, but at some point early in our marriage it became the place to put everything important. Social Security cards, birth certificates, ultrasound pictures, Nexus cards. And in a sea of Canadian passports…sits one crucial one.

My American one.

It’s a simple document, really, containing some stamps from not-all-that-exciting lands and a heinous photo of me.

Because you wanna know what I look like when some pimple-faced teen photographer tells me NOT to smile? I LOOK LIKE MR. BEAN, that’s who.

So, yes, after trips my passport gets put in the special purple box.

Unless it doesn’t.

Which is almost every time.

“Did you put your passport in the box?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Ali…..”

“Yes. I can do it right now. Just give me one second.”

And that’s when one second turns into one week and then one month.

And that’s how it gets to be 7am on a Sunday morning and you are inside a packed minivan and you are tearing all of your bags apart searching for your missing passport. That’s how it gets to be hours before you plan to cross the border at Sarnia and you are doing the ugly cry into your coffee outside of a McDonald’s. That’s how it gets to be 4 days before you need to fly into LaGuardia airport for BlogHer ’10 and you are forcing people like her to search the internet for “dumbass passportless dual citizens traveling in a way other than by land or by sea” because, dudes, according to the internet, if I was taking a boat to BlogHer, I’d be aces.

Well, as it turns out, sometimes the people who work at immigration are lovely. Sometimes they ask you simple, easy-to-answer questions. Sometimes they don’t give you a hard time about not having a passport. Sometimes they smile at you and send you on your merry way.

And sometimes your husband looks inside the bag that you turned inside-out 17 times and FINDS YOUR PASSPORT, OMG.

Viva la LaGuardia tomorrow! My Mr. Bean face and I are NYC-bound!

And now I am off to put my passport in the box.

Just as soon as I find some clothing under all the piles of unpacked stuff…