January January

Monday January 24, 2011

This is decided: I love having visitors. Please come visit. Jane and Ann were here for a week and now they are five hours away on the coast and I am hearing the echoes of their visit bounce around the walls of my little mountain cabina.

This is the story: Jane is turning 60 and her eldet-of-3 daughter, Julia (very good high school friend of mine), has been planning her b-day trip to Costa Rica since last May when Julia spent a few weeks here with me. It’s a sweet idea, but not that remarkable until you consider that Julia and her family kept the destination of Jane’s two week birthday trip a secret for six months. Jane did not know that she was going to Costa Rica until the night before she left. Even more remarkable: her very good high school friend, Ann, also came along. As a total secret. Jane didn’t know until she and I had arrived in the San Jose airport and Ann tapped her on the shoulder.

I realize that I am leaving large logistical holes in my story here, but the point is this: we had a good time and now they are gone and I miss them.

I am trying to think of highlights from their stay, but I find myself marveling instead at the nature of relationships, in general. How wonderful to cook and talk and laugh with two women 30 years older than I. How delightful to hear them talk about their children, their families, their lives, to hear them reminisce about high school days and college road trips.

And at the end of a week this is how I feel: I am lucky to be able to live in this beautiful place and want to share it with as many people as I can. So please feel free to stop by.
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Tonight there is a ferocious sunset. An explosion of colors. I sit at my dining room table and think of Jane. Jane loves sunsets. One could appropriately use the word “obsessed”. Sometimes I had trouble understanding what she was so excited by: until she had dragged me out and there I stood in front of it, heart opened to the world.

Tonight I stayed inside. I looked out the windows, through the trees at the splashes of sunset instead of walking five minutes down the road and through the bushes to see the entire sky ignite. A sadness, a regret came to me as I watched the colors fade: no one to share the colors with, no one to eat dinner with, or share dish duty.

I know this feeling and it is called LONELY. It’s not an entirely bad feeling, for it could not exist without the counter-balancing existence of love and good times. Yay – I have such good people in my life that I get to be sad when they are far away.
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SOME WONDERFUL THINGS:

→ The five hour ride back to Monteverde from Tamarindo, the beach town where Ann and Jane left me off to catch my shuttle. The last hour was over hilly mountains with the sun setting on the right and an uncovered Arenal Volcano on the left. Rodrigo, the shuttle driver, reached into his bag to snap some pictures of the volcano.
“Even living here you don’t get tired of the view?” I asked. He is from Cerro Plano, right next to Monteverde, and had been driving the Tamarindo – Monteverde evening route for years.
“It’s always different,” he told me.

→Just a few moments later as the sun’s last rays were bending around the curve of the earth, stretching, reaching, pushing, losing against the spin of the earth. The world was golden. Someone had spilled ink all over us as we wound through the mountains to Monteverde. We were on fire.

→This morning’s cold coffee and whole milk. How can something so simple be so delightful?

→ Sunday morning Jane and I left the apartment at 8 a.m. to walk the beach. After about 20 minutes we came across a hermit crab. I bent to examine it and heard Jane laugh.
“Oh my gosh – Ginna! Look at this!” I looked up.
“They are everywhere!” she said. At first I didn’t see, but then I stilled my eyes (now there’s a metaphor for life). Briefly frozen in place when they felt our footfall on the sand, hundreds of hermit crabs started their engines again when we stopped walking. I laughed out loud. All sizes – from pomegranate seed to walnut – they cruised up and down the beach, each zipping toward their own urgent appointment. I could almost hear the zoom-zoom-honk! of the Hermit Crab Highway.

→ That same morning I showed Jane how to use the macro setting on her camera and we took cool pictures. Spread the macro love!
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Tonight I tell Ji stories from my beach weekend with Ann and Jane and try to get a handle on my creeping loneliness.