Vuela, vuela/No te hace falta equipaje

I've been wondering: where in our bodies does long-stored joy live? 

Do scientists even know?

The memory of connection, of happiness, of safety, those feelings that make you delightedly embrace a friend from 30 years ago in your past—where do they live?

Over the years, I've read a lot of research about how trauma is storied on our bodies, reshaping them, and rewiring our minds.

Perhaps you've read "The Body Keeps the Score," or watched a video of Gabor Mate speaking about how trauma is stored in your body. How trauma isolates you, how it keeps your body in fight or flight mode, triggers you. How trauma leads to mental and physical illness. 

So much of my effort, over the years, has been focused on trauma.

And this post is about the opposite.

It's about connections forged decades ago. It's about laughter, love, and joy.

I've come to believe that just as trauma lives in our bodies, so does joy. So do feelings of friendship, safety, support, and connection. All of which have their roots in love.

I hadn't, until last week, thought about how our bodies might store past joy and deep connections and love for others.

We have happiness triggers, too. We just have to be in a space to activate them.

The weekend before last, a big group of Peace Corps friends converged for a reunion, hosted by our friends Cathy and Tim, who live on a beautiful lake in Michigan.

Cathy and Tim are the most gracious, generous, kind, and fun hosts. They opened their house, their yard, their boat, their hearts to all of us.

In the group photo at the top, it's the Saturday of the reunion weekend, and everyone who could attend is there.

Some of us have just been swimming in the lake. Tim has just returned from hosting a themed car parade in Fort Wayne, IN, which he organized with the sole purpose of putting more happiness into the world. I'm not kidding. He's still in the Ferris Bueller vest from the parade. 

On Friday, Cathy took those of us who were already in town on a tour of Ann Arbor. I didn't know that JFK announced the creation of the Peace Corps at the University of Michigan in 1960!

Carissa, who was organized the reunion, proffered out a "high-level agenda," with bingo and a Yankee swap, and a yoga class Saturday morning.

This isn't the best photo, but here we are, wearing our hard-won shigras (which we used in Ecuador market bags) as hats, laughing, laughing as always.

But the yoga: I said yes, of course, but was initially nervous when Carissa asked me, as I wasn't sure what kind of class my friends would want. And as it turned out, it was such a delight, yoga with friends lakeside on a perfect Michigan summer day.

Summer in the Midwest is spectacular, particularly if you have access to a lake. It's magical, with warm but not hot sunny days lasting till late late.

Cathy took us on so many gorgeous boat rides.

Our group first met in Miami in 1993, now 31 years ago. Multiple lifetimes. Many of us have grown children. Some have grandchildren.

We've lost friends since our Peace Corps days. Alfonso, Blanche. Maggie. And since the last reunion, Alto Ron, nicknamed such because he was so tall. Lovely Bonnie, so young and so beautiful. 

There were friends who couldn't join, and I bet their ears were burning all weekend, as we spoke of them so fondly.

In 2015, I joined a number of people in Austin for Rhonda's 50th birthday. This was my first time reconnecting with a group. And then in 2017, friends hosted a reunion on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Seattle.

The reunion in Michigan was the largest gathering I've been to. Some of us brought spouses and kids.

For this gathering, Janet, our artist, made coasters. Lovely recuerdos of our time together.

Our friend Neal, who hadn't seen anyone from Peace Corps years since 1995, wrote ahead of time, "I have been describing to my now college age kids the nuances of evolution of relationships and significance of mutual connections, even if transitional and seemingly fleeting in the scale of a lifetime." 

We were in different groups—engineering and health—with sites far apart. We hadn't spent much time together ever.

And still, we'd had a shared and very intense experience, now so long ago. I was excited to see him, to meet his wife, to hear about his life.

This time, Nick accompanied me, and I was so happy for him to meet everyone. 

Health volunteers:

Water engineering volunteers:

Special education volunteers:

Business volunteers:

I hadn't seen Jaime or Eric, both of whom lived near me, since 1995. They, along with Ralph and Juan Carlos, were my closest friends, my constant source of friendship, laughter, adventure.

Back then, you'd bring a sleeping bags, and crash at each other's sites. This was back when I could sleep anywhere. I envy my past self for that.

Eric lived an hour by bus up the mountain (not far in miles, but the road wasn't great), in a convent with Padre Antonio, a young, handsome, charming priest. Not much older than us, and so full of life.

Padre Antonio had a truck, and he'd take us on picnics, hikes to hot springs, exploring the area. His parents lived in San Blas, just a short walk from my village. They were lovely. We visited them regularly.

And then, sometime after I left, I heard there'd been a scandal. A woman was pregnant. Padre Antonio had left the priesthood.

But I never knew what happened.

And so, 30 years later, Eric told me the story. They'd kept in touch after Eric left, and thankfully, it worked out well. Antonio, Padre no more (but eventually a padre of five) left the priesthood. He had a family. He started an ecotourism company. He's since passed away.

I'd wondered about him, all these decades. He was kind, positive, generous. The type of person you'd want representing your organization, particularly if your organization was truly dedicated to serving those in need.

The priest in my village was always asking me to translate letters requesting things from American and European organizations. A car. Funding for personal projects.

The Catholic church had so much power in these villages. Our village priest shamed women during Mass for not having children. 

We weren't gallivanting about the countryside with him.

Volunteers in our area rented mailboxes at the post office in Ibarra, 30 minutes by local bus from my site. You'd ride with farmers toting grain bags, holding live chickens, everything.

I visited Ibarra and the post office regularly, to send and check for mail. I lived far from one of my besties, Neeta, and we wrote to each other several times a week.

Our sites varied so much. I had water and electricity. Neeta had to have water delivered by a truck. She used it for food, then washing, then plants. There was a hierarchy of need when you have a limited water supply.

Eric would come down the mountain and we would make a trip into the city. There was a bakery we found in Ibarra that had amazing bread and alfajores. We'd chat and write letters and just spend time.

It's weird to think about, that trips to the post office were an event around which we would plan our day. Now when we all have instant communication at our fingertips, and complain about not wanting to receive phone calls, or the burden of texting back.

But our lives were like that. We worked hard to maintain connection.

We circulated books. Peace Corps is where I read "Seeking John Galt," "The Fountainhead," and a massive book on Frida Kahlo, the title of which escapes me. We all read them. 

We shared tapes. I listened to Liz Phair's "Exile In Guyville," "Rites of Passage" by the Indigo Girls, and Maná's "¿Dónde jugarán los niños?" approximately a million times. 

The last time I had seen my friend Jeff, who also lived far from me, was in Quito. We went out for drinks and I poured my heart out about a complicated boyfriend. This past weekend, we talked about our lives now, our spouses and kids.

These were connections dormant for 30 years, and still we have such hope for the happiness of each other.

There are so many things I hadn't talked about, or really even thought about, in 30 years.

Like how one of the communities I worked in was only accessible by hitching a ride on a passing truck. The bus took you to a certain point, and then you had to wait for a truck that was heading into the valley. You had to do the reverse to get home.

Eventually Eric and I started an income-generation project there. 

A woman from his community made these adorable little ornaments, fake flowers and such, out of very simple ingredients. People would use them for decoration for weddings, quinceañera, etc. So we brought her down there to teach a group of women who were interested.

We did things like that. It was so different, after the structure of college and then an office job. 

I was untethered. So insecure, sure that everyone else was doing things right, and I was just faking it.

We regularly rode in the back of pickup trucks, or sometimes in the cab of a big truck driven by a person willing to take us. We paid for these rides. It was just normal, if schedule-wise unreliable, transport.

At the reunion, Eric called me "Lisacita," which nobody has done since Peace Corps. In our part of the sierra, anyway, everything was made diminutive.

Cariñito, amorcito, lindito. Our Spanish, or Castellano, as it was called, was infused with Quichua (or Kichwa) words and phrasing. 

Our villages had Quichua speakers. And how nice it was to say, "Quichua," and not have someone who'd spent time in other parts of South America correct me and say, "Actually, it's Quechua." Because in Ecuador, actually, it's Quichua.

The Castellano we learned was formal, and maybe the coastal volunteers acquired it, but I never learned the informal plural "you" because we were taught Ustedes. The sierra, anyway, was very formal. The Spanish we learned was infused with Quichua words and grammar. Like, "guagua" for baby. "Dame traendo..." for "Bring me..."

I don't know if "siga no más" is particular to Ecuador, but I haven't heard my Spanish friends use it. You'd hold the door open for someone and say, "siga no más." Go ahead.

Eric, Ralph, and I worked with a woman who always prefaced everything with, "No sea malita/o..." It was a softening before asking a favor, but literally translates to, "Don't be a little bad one."

We'd joke about it in English. "Don't be a little bad one. Hand me a pencil."

The names of the villages and towns our sites were in were names I hadn't said in three decades—Pablo Arenas (Eric's site, which he reminded me we liked to call Paul Sands), Atuntaqui, Jaime's site, and where he'd been biking from to my site when he had his terrible accident and had to be Medevaced to the US.

It felt good to talk about Urcuquí, my site, which back then had no street names or streetlights, but is now big and rather urban. This I know now because Jaime's wife is from Pablo Arenas, and she goes home regularly.

We talked about the bus rides we took then, ones we'd never allow our kids to take now. Us women, we would often limit their water intake ahead of time, and eat salty snacks. Because you didn't know if drivers would be willing to take a bathroom stop.

You were at the whim of the driver, always. 

They might stop for you if you had your hand out on the side of the road. They might make a million small stops to pick up passengers, livestock. They might not stop if you were begging, absolutely begging, for them to stop so you could pee.

Everything was arbitrary.

These were buses where you were happy for squealing brakes that were audible over the music, because at least this reminded you the brakes were working.

Buses where the driver and his assistant, because there was always a ticket taker, would be drinking, or the driver would be flirting with his girlfriend.

Andean roads at 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 feet in altitude, roads hugging the mountain with no shoulder on either side. Roads with blind curves, and sometimes you'd encounter a bus coming the other direction, and each driver would have to slowly slowly inch backwards and forwards until you could both pass. 

It always felt best to be the inside bus, in that situation.

Roads where you looked out your window and saw the massive drop you'd take if the bus went over. Roads with crosses on the side, for those who'd died.

I think it was Rich who said he was on a bus near Cuenca when one of the wheels fell of. The entire wheel just fell off and rolled away. They had to wait for trucks to hitch rides on.

Another friend told us that at some point, there were mudslides near their site, so until they were cleared, they'd take a bus to the point of the mudslide, walk around, and then get on another bus on the other side.

Juan Carlos and I talked about visiting Suzy at the coast, hours and hours of bus rides from where we were, high in the sierra.

We had to be back at our sites on Monday, and were lucky to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup from Suzy's site to Guayaquil, because there were no buses. The traffic was bad, and if our truck were in an accident, we'd have been flung out.

I was used to being in little pickups on low-traffic roads. This was a highway.

Someone reminded us this weekend that Juan Carlos had deemed Ecuador a "run with scissors" kind of country, and I don't know what it's like now, but that was a perfect description for what we were doing then.

The beach weekend, it was glorious. We swam, we ran around in the sand, we ate fish and patacones, which my god are so delicious. We laughed, because we always laughed.

We all have these very particular memories, connected to stories, connected to feelings. They live inside us, just waiting for the opportunity to bubble up, to blossom.

Jeff, I think, brought bank slips to the swap. I'd forgotten that we used to have to fill out these slips, and we'd get our monthly salary in sucres, which was then the currency of Ecuador.

I can't even remember how much we got paid each month. Maybe $130? But in sucres, that meant mountains of 1,000 sucre bills.

We'd get massive stacks. While still inside the bank, I'd divide them, putting some in my waist belt, some in my bra, some in each shoe.

Eric and I would also make a day of that, going on the bus to Ibarra, to the bank to get our wads of cash. Surely we also went to the post office, to the bakery, and to visit Ralph, if he wasn't already with us.

It was hard to organize things ahead of time without phones. We'd just drop in on each other, and then hang out waiting if their neighbor said they were out.

You'd be walking in your village and run into someone, and then you'd go to the market or stand in a line for something together. 

I wonder if people still have this time and spend it together.

It was the blessing and the hardship of being in a little village. There was no anonymity. I'd meet someone who was visiting, and they'd immediately tell me that I was the gringa who went running.

I am not an early bird, but in my village, it was dark at 6:00 pm, and I was in bed exhausted by 9:00. I'd get up at 5:45 am to run.

I'd put a massive kettle on my burner to heat water, so I could use it to bathe when I got back. In retrospect, I suppose I could've burned down my place, but luckily I never did.

I went early so there'd be as few people out as possible, as I already stuck out. But I'd run past farmers from my communities. And in Ecuador, you had to greet everyone individually. So I'd be huffing and puffing along at 7,500 feet altitude saying, "Buenos días señora, buenos días señor..."

I've just realized I don't remember the name of the sister of my landlord. Doña...I can't believe I can't remember her name, but recall she got a poodle she named Mercedes, Michi for short. She owned the bodega next to me. I spent a lot of time with her.

People used to laugh, because I referred to my landlord as, "mi dueño," when I should've been saying, "el dueño de mi vivienda"—because he was not, in fact, my owner, but rather the owner of my apartment.

As Yankee swap prizes, Cathy gave away blue soap, the hard blue cakes of soap that we would use to wash our clothing in the courtyard of my building. I had a bedroom and a kitchen, and shared a bathroom and a courtyard.

I'd forgotten about the blue soap, and the cold, cold water from the mountain.

Eventually I bought an electric shower head for our shared bathroom. The shower head had an immersion heater, so as long as you didn't turn the pressure up high, you could have a hot shower.

A group of us spent a Thanksgiving with friends in Azogues with a shower that shocked you whenever you turned it on, which in retrospect is terrifying.

When I think about how we would take buses for hours and hours, all day, buses we were afraid would fall off the side of the mountain, just to be together. We'd line up sleeping bags on the floor and just crash.

I threw a big party for my 25th birthday. So many friends came for the weekend, brought sleeping bags, lined up on the floor to sleep. Maude was visiting, for a whole month, and was there over my birthday.

I love when people I love from different areas of my life connect.

The proprietor of the bodega, my neighbor whose name escapes me, sold us so much beer that weekend. 

Among my neighbors with whom I shared the courtyard and the bathroom, was a married couple. The husband was a bus driver. The lovely wife was my birthday twin. And on our birthday, she was quite pregnant.

We were exactly the same age. On that birthday, I wondered if she was who I'd be, born to different parents in a different place.

There's something about shared experience, shared memories, that's so powerful. I don't believe this is particular to my high school group, or my Peace Corps group. It is not location or time specific. 

For us, in this group, it was Ecuador in the mid '90s.

What's rare, I think, is to be seen, to be heard, to be valued for who you have been, and who you are. 

So when I ask myself where joy lives, I think the answer is: everywhere. I believe it resides in each and every cell of our beings.

We dip the Proustian madeleine into the tisane—or maybe in our case, drink the trago, eat the patacones, listen to Maná—and let affection and connection drive the bus.

I've got to keep on keepin' on/You know the big wheel keeps on spinnin' around

Nick and I flew to Michigan last weekend for my Peace Corps reunion.

I have many loving things to stay about that. Many oh my gosh so many many.

I returned with my heart so full.

But first I'd like to talk about my own self-inflicted travel predicaments.

The thing is that when I fly, particularly if it's a long and difficult distance, I wind up buying something that will make my air travel experience more complicated. Slightly fraught. Physically uncomfortable.

Twenty-ish years ago, I had three flights on three different brands of airplanes when I went to South Africa, because I booked budget and last minute. This was way before I met Nick, and not that many years after 9/11.

Three airlines and three airports meant going through security thrice.

One of my last days in Cape Town, I saw this large and charming basket, with half-cowries decorating the wide rim.

It was big. It was delicate. I would have to carry it, and it would fill up my arms walking through each airport, and I'd worry about it in the overhead bin on every flight.

I still have it.

Then there was a large wooden turtle in Mexico. The turtle part would've been fine, had it not had long legs with feet sticking down and out, and a long neck sticking up in the air, with the carved head of a woman atop it.

This also had to be carried in my arms, and unwrapped for security because there were nails inside and the X-ray didn't like them.

Then last year, in Bali, I fell in love with a carved wooden king dragon mask. It's really cool. The whole shop had incredible carvings.

Fiona and I returned on our last full day, when I'd decided to go ahead and buy it. And then I was like, oh, who knows if I'll ever make it back to Bali, and maybe I should get two masks? Because Jordan will love this one. And I always find tons of stuff for India, and nothing for my boy.

So I bought two. One for him and one for me, for the living room.

They were much larger than they seemed on the shop wall. And solid wood, quite heavy. I realized this when I was trying to return to the hotel on the back of a hired scooter.

The next morning, Fiona helped me completely rearrange my suitcase and carry-on so I could fit them both separately and surrounded by cushioning clothing.

Fortunately, I've turned into my dad for travel, and now bring my own pillow. That helped.

They arrived in DC unscathed.

And then! Jordan did not love king dragon.

But I still do.

So post-reunion, on the Sunday, Nick and I went into Ann Arbor. The rental car place had given us this bright orange Jeep, which was cute, but had no trunk.

And as such, being from DC where we lock the car door before we leave the garage, and do not leave anything visible in the car, lest the windows get smashed, we were nervous to go into Detroit and be tourists, what with our bags just hanging out in the back.

So we went into Ann Arbor, which Nick hadn't been able to see when the group went Friday, because he'd had to stay back and work.

We had lunch and then wandered a bit, and came across a little market.

Where, almost immediately, we spotted a table with crocheted items, including and most spectacularly, this crocheted triceratops! 

We asked the lovely young woman behind the table about it.

She gave us a price and said it was expensive, because it had taken an entire week to make. Plus the cost of the yarn. Plus a local woman had made the eyes.

I gushed over it a big and then we thanked her and kept walking through the market. I kept talking about the triceratops, and how charming it was.

And finally Nick was like, "Do you love it?"

I said I did.

So we walked straight back to her table and said we'd like to purchase the triceratops.

The young woman's cheeks turned pink and her eyes teared up. She said, "Really?"

Really.

I asked if I could take her photo, and then Nick suggested I get in the photo, and then her younger brother, who was helping her with her stall, got dragged into the picture as well.

It was adorable.

So my triceratops, her name is Ann. Her last name is Arbor.

I got caught in an exit door leaving the airport in DC, because one arm was full of her and the other was dragging my suitcase.

Actually, that's not why I got caught.

There's a big sign over the door saying you can only go out. Exit only. No entry. 

I was all, fine, we're leaving. And then the doors clamped down and I was stuck and I was all what the fuck?

But it was my fault, because with these exit doors, there's a door you go through, and then a corridor, and another door. And there was already a woman in there who was at the exit door.

Apparently you're supposed to wait until the person ahead of you is through.

They don't want both doors open at once so that someone could bypass security and dash in through the out door (out door...)

So the woman in front was struggling with that door, because of me. And Ann, my luggage, and I were squashed in the other set of doors that were trying their hardest to close.

Finally the woman in front got through and then my doors opened and we got through.

And then Nick was all judgy at the other end. 

Because he is a man who reads instruction manuals and knows how things work and also is not the kind of person who is scared of revolving doors because he likely in younger years never tried to squeeze in with someone.

Cathy's partner Tim is an engineer, and while we were talking about his work, it came out that he has written numerous user manuals for cars, and he said, "You've probably never read any." 

And I was all, "NICK READS THE MANUALS!"

And then Nick confirmed this. He reads the manuals so he knows how things work. He knows how our appliances function. He knows what the myriad options are on the car.

So he reads the manuals and I don't, and I live my life limited to the bits of technology that I understand.

And then when there is something extraordinary, then I call him and am like, what does the dashboard light mean that looks like a lotus? Or maybe more like an exclamation point with angry lines coming out each side?

He actually got this one very quickly. I think by now he's used to these questions, having at first been very WTF about the yellow submarine light.

Apparently this light means I'm too close to the person in front of me. Which couldn't be helped in fucking Connecticut or on most of 95, for that matter. 

In searching for a flying song for the title, I was reminded of my difficulty with these song lyrics.

And being with Nick is like being with Big Ol' Chedo Lino, in the best possible way. It means that I always feel safe, which is a feeling that's very important to me. But it also means there is often not enough room for him.

We were on a relatively little plane to Detroit—a Bombardier—which I pronounced bombard + ee-ay, but Nick contends is pronounced bomb-a-deer.

Anyway, they're not all that big, so they took our carry-on luggage before we got on the plane. We only had our personal item. I was a little worried about Ann, since she's not small, but they didn't care that I was carrying a stuffed animal. 

I was going to hold her but then I realized I wouldn't be able to have a drink or eat a snack or read without some difficulty. Nick put our items in the overhead.

And then when he was getting it all out, there was this big long narrow thing in a bag, and the couple behind us said, "Oh, be careful with that."

So Nick handed it to them gently, and then asked what it was.

They said, "It's a monopod."

We were all, huh?

So the guy said, "It's for a camera. A tripod had three legs. This has one. It's a monopod."

And then we disembarked and that was that.

Later, when we were getting ready for bed, I was like, "Isn't that just a stick?"

Mad dogs and Englishmen (and me)

When the kids were quite young, we took them to southern Spain in the hottest hotness ever recorded in the history of heat in Spain.

It was all anyone talked about. It was literally the only topic of conversation, no matter where you went.

It is exactly like this in DC right now.

Except the thing is, I live here.

And apparently every single human to whom I have ever spoken in my neighborhood or in the course of my daily life knows my proclivity for the heat.

Which is all well and good except for the fact that it's as hot as the surface of the sun in DC.

The Capital Weather Gang—whose profession is WEATHER—actually described DC as hell. Read the first line of the photo below.

And while the current heat is in fact Stygian, and I don't prefer it, I still take it over cold. Yes, my ideal is probably 95 degrees and dry. 

In the 90s to 100s and humid is not pleasant.

I do a lot of coming home and immediately swooning onto the sofa like a consumptive Victorian.

And still, I do not complain, because I fervently believe that you get to complain about one season. This is what I tell my kids, who completely ignore me and whine about both excessive heat and cold.

But since I complain bitterly all winter, longing for summer, I just suck it up in summer.

Yesterday I needed to pick up a prescription in the afternoon, so I biked to K Street and back, which is a little over three miles roundtrip, with the return trip almost completely uphill.

By the time I got home I just wanted to drink cool water and lie on the floor. Wanda and I have been hanging out like this a lot.

But the point of my story is this: everyone knows that I prefer heat. And when I run into them, almost to a person, the conversation goes as follows:

Me: Hi! How are you?
Them: It's so hot. It's too much.
Me: Yeah, it's really hot.
Them: I know you like this heat.

They have a tone. As if I'd willed this upon us with my love of summer heat.

I've had to stifle the urge to apologize.  

The first couple times it happened, I actually felt guilty, as if by loving the heat I'd somehow invited this discomfort on others.

So now I am all, "Gosh, even for me, this is too much!"

Reader, it is not too much for me. I would like it to cool down. I'm hoping for a thunderstorm that breaks the heat.

But I would not trade it for cold.

And then I started thinking that it wouldn't be my chosen superpower—I think I'd pick flying or breathing underwater—but lacking a superpower, I wouldn't turn it down.

Like, if I could direct a heatwave, and concentrate it on one person, that would be kind of amazing.

Basically, I could be like, here, have a big wallop of perimenopause. This hot flash, however, is going to last three days straight. Maybe a week.

Depends on how I'm feeling towards you.

That I might find immensely satisfying. What I'm saying is, if someone offered me this superpower, I would not turn it down.

But let's be clear. I don't control the weather. I can barely get my kids to clean their rooms.

In the immortal words of Power Station, “Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on.”

Indeed.

Every rose has its thorn/Just like every night has its dawn

I don't claim to be any kind of flower expert, but I can recognize more than one or two.

My mom was an incredible gardener, and in my childhood she always grew zinnias, marigolds (and mariyellows, as I called the yellow ones), snapdragons, cox comb, sweet peas.

And as I mentioned in a previous post, so much of the foliage in Bali was that of my childhood. I used to pronounce frangipani "frangy-pangy"—and it wasn't that long ago that I realized that frangipani is plumeria, and we have it in the US.

It's one of my favorite flower fragrances. (Ooh, the alliteration!)

And a year ago in Bali, I spent a lot of my free time journaling and drinking tea on my porch, luxuriating in the view.

I mean, really. What a blessing!

As Bali is near the equator, darkness comes early. And every evening on my way in, I'd see the Buddha statue out of the corner of my eye, and I'd always think it was a person, and startle before I remembered.

You'd think this wouldn't happen day after day. However. 

Anyway, Fiona would often join me on my porch, and at some point we noticed these particular white flowers.

How could we not have noticed them before? We'd never seen anything like them.

They were in the middle of a bunch of foliage and some water, so not easily accessible. We didn't see them anywhere else on the extensive grounds of the hotel. None on the way to the yoga shala.

I felt lucky to have such unusual water flowers in my garden. They looked like they grew on very thin stalks. Maybe they were some kind of flowering reed?

In any case, clearly rare and tropical.

Even if we learned what they were, we couldn't take them home, as you cannot bring agricultural products into either of our countries.

But we were dying to know. We kept forgetting to ask the hotel staff about them.

We talked about these flowers so much. 

I'd seen a couple of snakes on paths near my room, so I was cautious about stepping into the foliage. But I was dying to know.

So finally, during the day, I decided I was going to tiptoe over, minding my footing and carefully stepping on rocks, to get a close-up and figure out what these were.

Thankfully, I was able to snap these photos. Because the next day, they were gone! Plucked from the garden!

Yes.

So while Indonesian bottle brushes may somehow be more exotic than American ones, I bet they're all made in China, and you can buy them at Home Depot.

John, I'm only dancing

I don't know if you've ever thought of someone from your past and googled their name to find that they are no longer with us.

This happened yesterday.

I googled my friend Debbie, neighbor of Alyssa who had chicken for dinner, to find that she died in 2007.

Her parents are still alive. And so many years ago, they had to say goodbye to their daughter, who would never turn 40.

Her mom had been an actress in Poland before they came to the US. She had a strong accent. This was the era when we learned about ibuprofen as a pain reliever, and she called it "eeboopreen" and so that's what my mom thought it was called for the longest time. 

"Do you need an eeboopreen?" Now I find it cute, but back then it drove me crazy.

The truth is, I hadn't seen Debbie in decades. Something would remind me of her every once in a while, because for about three years, we had a very intense friendship.

I guess all my friendships have always been intense.

At some point her dad came into money, and bought a huge house in a fancier neighborhood, which was in a different school district, and they moved out of our modest neighborhood.

And she hated it. She hated the new school.

One night, she ran away. She walked miles over to the parkland behind our house. She was going to live down by the creek. 

Since this was the early 80s, the "It's 10:00. Do you know where your children are?" era, we'd spent entire days down by the creek, exploring the parkland. We played kick the can with neighborhood kids in the dark.

Our parents weren't actually looking for us until it was clear we weren't home for dinner or bedtime.

Basically, she was going to live down there and I was going to supply her with food.

The plan was not sophisticated. She just wanted out of the painful situation into which she'd been thrust.

We'd read books like My Side of the Mountain and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Running away for a time and living in nature or the Metropolitan Museum of Art seemed like an actual option.

In books like that, where the kids are very self-sufficient, you don't have the view of the parents freaking the fuck out wondering if their child has been kidnapped or killed.

In any case, I think it was my brother who spotted her down by the creek and told my parents.

I mean, the police were out looking for her. It was a crisis.

And in retrospect, I see us as kids, tweens, living in traumatic situations and not having the words. Not having been told that we could ask for help. Not trusting that someone would help us, except our friends.

We couldn't trust our parents to fix the situations when our parents were the cause of them.

Anyway, then her parents got divorced and her mom and the kids moved back to our neighborhood and her dad became a Zionist.

And then my family moved to India, and all we had was letter communication. Which I only succeeded at in starts and fits.

I'd see her in the summer, and they had cable, which meant we'd spent hours in her living room watching MTV. 

She was funny and smart and artistic. She was a year ahead of me, and at some point she was studying ancient Egyptians, and for a project she decided to make jewelry, like in a museum exhibit. So we rolled out clay into snake necklaces and such.

It was a really cool project. I was jealous.

At her house, we had Kraft macaroni and cheese, which we never had at my house. It was magical.

One summer after we moved to India, we came home and stayed with the neighbor next door to our house, which we rented out to another Foreign Service family. I met the son, who had coincidentally been in high school in Kenya with one of my New Delhi besties.

And he was so cute. We met, and then in the way of the teenager, all we wanted to do was make out to Tears for Fears.

We did a lot of that in a very short span of time. His mom wanted him to get a summer job and we wanted to sneak off and make out.

In a horrible coincidence, he was also the boy Debbie had had a crush on the entire previous year of high school. He had no idea.

I never told him, of course, because she'd have killed me. And I never told her about the making out. Why hurt her feelings? I'd be gone in a week.

Debbie is the one who introduced me to David Bowie. She bought the albums and made me tapes. 

We loved David Bowie. We loved him so much. We even loved his weird songs like "The Laughing Gnome," and "Come and Buy My Toys"—which, I learned as a mom reading Mother Goose, is a nursery rhyme. "Please Mr. Gravedigger," on the other hand, is probably not.

At one point, she gave me a special edition album of Diamond Dogs, and I wish I'd kept it, but it got let go somewhere in one of our many moves.

In any case, I hadn't seen her since the late 1980s.  

And I know that when we grieve, the pain we feel is for ourselves. 

I know that with each loss of someone dear from my past, it's a reminder that I don't have my mom to tell. Because I would definitely tell her about Debbie. 

But probably she already knows.

She wasn't mine to lose, and I think, who am I to be sad, when I hadn't tried to contact her for over 25 years?

But I also think, gosh, now I never can.

The quicksand but not a metaphor

On Monday, I returned from dropping my progeny off at camp. This entailed driving almost 1,200 miles to Maine and back. 

I did not go to the beach.

Wendy pointed out that mileage-wise, I drove almost halfway across our country.

So then I started thinking about it and if my geography were better, I might know how many European countries that would equal.

But what I really want to talk about is quicksand.

If you are a person from the 1900s, and particularly if you're from the slice of the 1900s that includes a youth in the 1970s, then we may have shared common fears.

We didn't have a TV when I was a kid, but in any case, this was before the age of cable, and the bulk of programming in India and Bangladesh would've been local.

When we lived in Dhaka, each week we would go to the house of our dear friends who had a small black and white TV to watch Flipper the Dolphin and Little House on the Prairie.

Little House was a huge part of my childhood. My mom and I read the books together. And Mrs. Medley, my delightful second grade teacher, was reading them to us as well.

One day we had a substitute teacher, and she pronounced Almanzo's name wrong, and I was outraged.

Also, when we'd go spend time with my grandmother in North Dakota, we got to watch a whole lot of TV and always watched Little House. We were in Minot, which was the big city, but after all, not so far from the prairie.

Like, when my mom was a kid, they'd walk on the prairie and find arrowheads.

On a side bar, we also watched a nature show sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, though I've forgotten the name of it. And of course we watched Lawrence Whelk.

We ate dinner, which we called supper, at 5:00 pm, and sometimes we got to use TV trays and watch television while we ate.

It was all very decadent. Unimaginable in real life. And really, probably only possible because my dad was not with us.

We were so fascinated by television that we watched any and everything we could. I watched soap operas—their stories, my grandma and aunt called them—in the afternoon. 

Each summer, I would become, over the span of two weeks, deeply invested in The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live.

In any case, I desperately wanted a bonnet, and in retrospect, I find it surprising that my mom didn't make one for me, since she sewed so well and made us so many cute things.

But what I'm saying is, we got our American pop culture in bursts.

And we got enough that I genuinely believed that quicksand was an ever-present danger. 

In case you aren't from this particular era and don't know how to save yourself: If you try to walk or run out of it, you're a goner. You have to spread your body weight and use a swimming motion to safely get to solid ground.

Also, back then the Bermuda Triangle could swallow you at any moment, never to be seen again. It didn't matter that Bermuda was on the other side of the world from us, and we'd never flown, as far as I knew, even remotely close to it. 

The Triangle was there, and waiting.

As if those weren't enough, you could always be knocked on the head and suffer from amnesia. That wasn't terrifying, the way quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle were, but it was still a regular possibility. 

So throughout the 1970s, you had to be emotionally prepared to die of quicksand, disappear from the air, or suddenly have no idea who you were.

Were there other fear list items? Surely there were, but those were my big ones.

So imagine my tremendous joy when a couple weeks ago I learned that a woman fell into quicksand on a beach in Maine!

Her husband immediately pulled her out. So she's fine. I wouldn't be rejoicing her demise or anything.

But quicksand!

It felt like when I know I'm right, and my husband insists on doing something his way, and then it goes badly and at some point it becomes clear that if he'd just done it my way in the first place, things would've been so much easier.

That kind of satisfaction.

I told my friend Pam, who I was staying with in Portland, and she was all delighted as well.

Quicksand! Ha!

I will admit that I kind of wanted to go to the beach and see if we could find any, but it was 62 degrees and raining and I didn't want to investigate my childhood terrors that bad.

On our trip up to Maine, we spent two nights in Boston with friends. The drive to Boston should've taken eight hours, but because Waze told us to go through Connecticut, it took 10 hours and approximately five years off my life.

I was like, what the fuck with Connecticut, which I've always considered an inconveniently-located state in the first place.

A friend who does the drive regularly then offered me a better route that avoids Connecticut completely. But on the return trip I was visiting my beloved college roommate Lesley in Hartford, so there was no way around it.

I feel like this is kind of turning into a chicken for dinner kind of diary entry.

And I am not kidding you, my childhood friend Debbie peeked at her neighbor Alyssa's diary one time, and the entirety of one entry was "we had chicken for dinner".

It drives me crazy that I can't list more than maybe 10 US presidents, I retain almost no historical facts, and my geography is appalling, but I know what Alyssa—who I barely knew and found kind of irritating—wrote in her diary in like 1982.

One might wonder if I had amnesia, but I think it's just the quicksand.

We are stardust, we are golden

One year ago today, I went with Fiona and four other new friends to Pura Tirta Empul in Ubud, Bali, to visit the temple and do a water purification ritual.

And I just realized when I was typing that water purification sounds like filtering through a Brita jug, rather than using the water for self-purification.

According to Hindu tradition, the water at this temple is holy. You say a prayer and put your head under each of the water spouts, washing the water over you.

A couple years ago, my mom and I went to the memorial service of a dear friend. She was surprised when I got up to take communion (not Catholic, so we were all invited), and I said I needed all the help I could get.

This is how I felt about the water purification ritual at the temple. As long as we were invited to take part, I wanted to embrace the blessing.

Fiona and I had arrived late the night before, by the temple trip a full 12 hours later we were besties.

Our lovely driver, who Fiona had organized with via WhatsApp, suggested going to the Tirta Empul temple the next day, because it was a full moon, a particularly auspicious time to go.

He had six seats in his car, so Fiona offered the trip to our new friends at breakfast, four of whom wanted to join us.

It was magical.

It's easy to ascribe meaning to events in hindsight, but so I will just say that thankfully, in the wake of losing my mom, the world lined up for me to go to that particular training in Ubud.

While my mom was alive, there was no way I'd consider Bali, even though all but one training for the company I'd chosen took place there. It would've been unthinkable to be 25 hours of travel away from my mom, in case anything happened.

And then, when the worst possible thing happened, the arms of the world opened up wide, and I threw myself into them without hesitation.

It occurred to me, and I asked Nick, and I texted the company to ask if it was possible, and I bought a ticket. All of this happened I think on the same day. And then I drove the kids to Maine and then I left.

I was scared to go so far away alone, though I did so with no hesitation in my 20s. I was extremely anxious about an intense yoga teacher training. 

All I knew was that I had to go. I couldn't stay in an empty house where everything reminded me of my mama.

In retrospect, I couldn't have chosen anything more healing.

Though Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, Bali is Hindu. The temples and gods and rituals, though not mine, were so familiar. The vegetation was that of my childhood. The smell of incense was everywhere.

Because I didn't grow up with home as a fixed address, it was familiar enough that it felt, in some ways, like home.

Now I can say that I arrived an absolutely crazy person, hollowed out by grief. I didn't, at that point, have things that I was affirmatively seeking.

I was just desperately escaping.

But because I'd lived through losing my dad, I didn't feel guilty when, deep in my sorrow, I laughed.

I knew their energetic vibration is so similar, and that experiencing joy wasn't denying my grief. It didn't diminish how much I loved and missed my mom.

And so I threw myself wholeheartedly in.

The teachers told one of my friends that the group before us had been entirely composed of very young women. And they got very competitive about their outfits.

I don't even know what I'd have done if I'd wound up in that group.

So on the one hand, I don't believe that things happen as they're meant to. I don't believe my mom was meant to miss that final step and fall on our landing and break her hip. And then go to the hospital and never come home.

I just don't.

But sometimes life lines up in a way that makes me feel so lucky, and then I do in fact wonder about stars aligning and the universe and such.

And I do firmly believe that we are all connected. And since we have the laws of thermodynamics proving that energy doesn't go away, who is to say that we're not all together somewhere in the same time and space.

Which is all to say, I have no idea. I'm one of those people who picks the pieces of things that I like out of the whole.

Which is part of why I sucked at math. Because I'd pick and chose the parts of the problems I understood to solve, and then I'd combine them.

This doesn't lead to the correct answer, but it does really confuse your teachers.

But I do feel like it was such a blessing that I wound up in that time and place. And I feel lucky that Fiona had had to change her ticket so we wound up on the same flight, and I feel beyond lucky that we connected immediately and intensely.

This morning I realized it was Maude's birthday, which meant it was the second of July, which also meant it was the one-year anniversary of my life-changing adventure in Bali.

I think back to the people who cared about me almost immediately. The kindness and generosity of almost complete strangers.

It's striking to me that our training group included a very young woman who'd lost her mother the year prior. She knew exactly where I was.

When I was in tears because, when we were supposed to be coming up with our own sequences for the final, and I couldn't remember Sun Salutation A, which is foundational, she said it was because I had grief brain.

Nothing stayed. I couldn't remember anything. Anything. I couldn't remember anything, but I felt everything acutely.

Having someone explain it so simply as grief brain was a blessing.

Making a new friend with whom I resonated so deeply at a time when I felt frail and vulnerable felt like the biggest gift. 

When I need to visualize a place of peace and happiness, I conjure up the image of the rice paddy next to our yoga shala. I envision laughing with Fiona leaving the field, or while walking to meals, or squeezed into the same cash vestibule trying to figure out how many zeros to add to make $100 in Indonesian Rupiah.

I'm a terrible visualizer—which always surprises and frankly kind of offends me, because I have such a good imagination—but all of these images are so accessible.

I think now, a year later, I want to tell some of these stories. They bubble up from time to time. I had every intention of telling them after the training but then all this other stuff happened and I finally feel like maybe I'm coming back to me.

Truly I know that I come from a place of immense privilege to escape across the globe at the worst time in my life. I used money my mom had left me, and the freedom of children at camp, and I spent the cash and the opportunity.

Those three weeks of healing, and the yoga teacher certification were Betty's gift to me.

Last week, in Boston on the way to camp, I took a class taught by one of my yoga teacher training friends. She and I had been paired for a meditation exercise. We were supposed to stare into each others eyes and transmit love and compassion.

And we couldn't stop laughing. But tears were also pouring down my face. We were doing the exercise, and I think discharging an excess of profound emotion through laughter.

It's one of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had.

Also, her class was fantastic. She invited us to set an intention, and if we didn't have one, she offered the suggestion of gratitude. And I will always feel grateful for the friendships and deep connections that began a year ago.

I have long known that time actually helps. Even deep in the midst of my grief, and then my fear of cancer, and the pain of recovering from surgery, I knew that time was my friend. 

But time is also is the longest distance between two places.

So.

Here I am, one year later, healthy, and in such a different and more positive energetic space.

I'm truly, profoundly grateful.