Last week as we sat in the hot springs outside Pucón, the thick fog forming droplets on my hair and the smell of sulfur clinging to the inside of my nostrils, I realized that in ten weeks I would be on a plane home. I imagined landing back in PDX and walking on the familiar carpet out to meet my dad, who for the third time in nine months would pick us up and take us to Los Gorditos for a vegetarian burrito before dropping us off at Alison and Brian’s house. I would struggle, like always, to stay awake until a respectable hour, then fall into a deep sleep until waking early to my first day of being in Portland again, this time for good.
It is now only nine weeks till we move home; I am both ready and yet can hardly believe it. Where has the time gone? I know the answer and the memories of it fill me with joy; riding camels in the Sahara, scooting around Vietnam eating bahn mi and staring at the giant limestone rock formations in the forest, sitting across from Vanessa in Guatemala as she patiently taught me Spanish each day, trekking through the mountains of Patagonia and drinking wine in the refugios each night, sleeping on tatami mats and soaking in the onsen in Japan and practicing yoga in Bali. These are some of my favorite memories and rattling them off like a grocery list hardly does justice to the experience of it all.
I have struggled to write about the experience while we have been away, as if I am too close-up to reflect on it. As time passes more quickly and home becomes more of a reality, I can already feel some of the distance being created from this experience. I sometimes find myself daydreaming about organizing the shelves in the kitchen or washing the dishes after dinner with music playing as the rain falls softly outside.
In so many ways, I do not want it to end. I love sleeping as much as I need to, spending hours of each week hiking in the mountains and biking around and saturating my senses with each new experience. I wonder what it will be like to move from this back to home, where life is familiar and I know where to buy my groceries and my favorite coffee. I think about this often and frequently find myself forgetting to include work in my vision of moving home, which of course will be a part of it. I want to work, I love being a midwife. Yet I can’t quite move getting up at six in the morning, on a dark and rainy day, into my visioning of the next phase of life. I know it will come, and it will be good, but I am not quite ready to dream of it yet.
It has been a year without Fridays or Sundays, marked instead by cities and countries, buses and flights, sunrise and sunset, and punctuated by each load of clean laundry to which Jason has pointed out I predictably respond “Aren’t clean clothes the best!” It has been full of the mundane as well, packing and unpacking, in constant search of a place to rest our heads, wearing what are now the same boring and sometimes dirty clothes over and over again. I hate to admit it but the act of travel itself can become repetitive as well, seeing one more mountain, temple, historical landmark. It is glamorous and normal all at once. I want to maintain a sense of intrigue and awe at my surroundings, at life, while also acknowledging that being on the road is not always some magical potion to make that happen.
It takes intention, anywhere, to show up with a posture of gratitude and to chose to be present in each moment. Trying to carry this idea with me each day we are traveling and to take it home with me.
