Morning Musings

I slept in for the first time since arriving and woke up into a gorgeous day, all sun and breeze and wild mountain beauty.  My clothes were sitting in the washer ready to be hung out to dry in the sun (which has been sadly missing for the whole time I’ve been here) and I could hear the pan sizzling as Ben made pancakes for Frances’ birthday.  And Lauren, another intern who’s my age and really sweet, is moving in today so I’ll have another roommate.  So I thought that while I sit in the company of the daisies and the hypatia bushes and the little stream over by the pump, I could spend a little time writing about pieces from my first two weeks here.

My first impression of Costa Rica, which I consider to be the moment when I first stepped outside of the airport into the city, is sort of bleached and incomplete because I was too concerned with finding the bench where I was supposed to meet Chelsea.  But there was the bench right outside the door, and before I could even consider sitting down to wait, there was Chelsea.  She was slim, Korean, a naturally beautiful woman with little or no make-up and her hair pulled back casually.  “Leigh Anne?” she asked, with a genuine smile, and when I said yes, she pulled me into a motherly hug.  I liked her at once.   

Her two youngest children, Nadia and Nathan, helped pull along my suitcases and then we got into a beat-up red car and drove through the city, where memories of Quito, of beggars and loud Spanish and dust, slammed into my mind.  I was quiet for most of the drive up into the mountins because, even though I didn’t feel too out-of-place, I could feel something invisible and weighty inside me slowly starting to shift.  Even sitting in the passenger seat on my first day in Costa Rica, twisting through a land wild with green in a car full of strangers,  I knew that the summer would change me.  Which is in some ways the most terrifying part, that the self I had before leaving will shed off in a ghostly layer and never come back.

I’m not sure that makes any real sense, but I thought I’d take this beautiful morning to write to you all and let you know that although being a stranger to a place, culture, and language sometimes makes me feel foolish, I am genuinely happy here in Varablanca.  And it somehow feels that I’ve always been here.  Or no, it feels that I was meant to be in this rainy jungle town with these very people in these very months and that things are coming together just as they ought to be.