Hot feet

It's getting hotter now. We went to the beach yesterday. To get there we walk through the coconut grove. It's a large grove, planted almost like an orchard. Coconut trees don't give a lot of shade, and the ground is covered with a sand that is nearly dust. On hot days the coconut grove seems to go on forever.

No one wanted to wear shoes despite our warnings of hot sand. Even Chinua declined, believing, I suppose, that the soles of his feet are made of leather. We were fine on the way there. The sand hadn't heated up too much.

We swam, played in the sand, ate lunch at one of the beach shacks. A rest day. I'm religious about them now. I say no to visitors, get out of the house, stop cleaning for a while, don't plan meetings or anything. We have a full schedule. A beautiful schedule, but a full one. So one day of rest is important.

On the way home we started to walk on the edge of the coconut grove and quickly discovered that the sand was too hot to walk on. Only I had shoes. We stood at the edge of the vast grove and contemplated our choices.

"Okay. We'll follow this path first, run from shade to shade." The radical coconut hairstyles were casting frond shadows on the ground in spots. We did it, clumping from one spot of shade to the next. Then we ran to the sparse grass that is still in the grove in clumps. (After monsoon it's everywhere, then it gradually dries up and disappears, until only a bit is left.) We dodged trash and crows. Chinua used his Bear Grylls voice. We've been watching episodes of Man Vs. Wild.

"It's the heat that'll get you," he said. "You'll be roasted in seconds out here."

Halfway across, I discovered I'd left our steel water bottle. I trekked back to the restaurant to get it.

When I caught up with my family again, I couldn't help laughing. And laughing. How I love them.

They were sitting under the banyan tree (there is a single banyan tree in the coconut grove) constructing sandals for themselves with pieces of cardboard they'd found. They were tying the cardboard to their feet with dried coconut fronds. Cardboard shoes! Chinua's worked the best. YaYa managed to keep hers on until she was halfway home. Solo was carried. Kid A and Leafy declined shoes after Kid A's fell off. They ran home so fast that their feet only touched the ground for moments. They didn't even get a chance to burn.

On Love

Yesterday we were on the beach for sunset. We made a beautiful rangoli with holes for candles and we sat around it singing worship songs. Little kids came and joined in sculpting the rangoli, and many people gathered to sing and listen, and it was beautiful.

And then Solo hid under the fishing nets in one of the fishing boats nearby, and I couldn't find him for twenty minutes or so. I started looking with ease, because he never goes far, and I knew he was really interested in the boats, but after calling near them three times and looking all over, I started to run. And the minutes between starting to run and the moment when I saw Chinua walking toward me with Solo holding his hand, those minutes when I was running along the beach diving in and out of the huge drum circle, praying and gasping, looking wildly at every small child around, those minutes were the most terrifying kind of love.

You are on a cliff of love and if you fall off you could break on the rocks.

But then, there were Chinua and a small Solo with him. Angels in the sand, standing right next to where all the South Americans sell the beautiful macrame jewelry.

I was hiding, he said.

Hiding under the nets in a fisherman's boat. For ages.

I've never been so glad for anything as simple as a sandy face beside mine before.

This is love.

*

I have a habit of proposing to my husband. I do it all the time. I see him standing at our shelf, pulling some article of clothing out and holding it up to see if he wants to wear it, and my heart gets a little bigger. "Can I marry you?" I ask. "Yes." "Today?" "Let's do it!" he says.

Or, we sit next to each other on the couch. I hug his arm. (He has very huggable arms.)

"Can I live with you forever?" "Can we spend our lives together?" "I would really like to marry you." There are many ways that I ask. His answer is always the same. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I'd love to. YES.

I'm goofy, I know, but this is what faithfulness is really about isn't it? Saying "I will marry you," over and over and over and over. Even if you're the husband and cute girls are always making eyes at you, or you're the wife and you can tell that guy at the café finds you attractive, which is flattering because you feel like an old mom who is always picking toys out of the cracks in the furniture.

You turn away from them and say, "I want to marry you," right to your husband or wife. You say it again and again and again with your presence. Marriage is a greenhouse for love. The greenhouse is wild and deep and grows remarkable things that can't be grown over night. Some flowers take ten years to grow. Some, sixty.

The greenhouse is interesting and funny and witty and wild.

This is love.

*

A couple of days ago we went to the beach. It's ironic that I live so close to the sea but have to schedule it in, because I get stuck in my house, my garden, homeschool, meditation center. All right here, breathing in my ear while I sleep. So Sunday became family beach day. And this Sunday the boys weren't so into swimming. They were into scooping sand into piles.

But YaYa was into swimming, and I took a little convincing because it felt cold when I went in (how quickly I have fallen from my hardcore Canadian roots) but I became very into swimming too. We went out where YaYa likes to go, where she is almost unable to touch the bottom so she can practice treading water, but I am still touching so she can grab onto me if she gets tired. We sang. We danced little dances and said nonsense vowels. We told each other we loved each other at least a hundred times. We heaped adoration onto each other.

Do I ever make her sound perfect? I don't mean to. She is lovely but not perfect. She can be hard to teach. She can be very resistant to me. Her voice has been a bit shrill lately. So it's beautiful when we leave everything else behind and just play together. Chinua eventually took the boys home and we stayed. We got out a couple times to warm up in the sun. I lay with my eyes closed and if I opened them she would be there with her head propped on her hand, watching me. Every once in a while she would put her hand on my back or my stomach, just to touch me. For that time, we had nothing to do but be together. Then we'd run back into the water and float around, jumping over waves or ducking under them.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

This is love.

*

Have you ever loved a country? Especially one besides your own?

When you love one as unwieldy and kaleidoscopic as India, it's love that wavers and bleeds into all other kinds of emotions. The need to belong. The acceptance of not belonging. Sorrow for the ways things don't work properly sometimes, for the man on the hot road carrying one heavy brick for hours, the workers with the tar pourer, breathing in the stench.

But the love. Families, old women in a row in jewel bright saris, flowers in their hair. Women touching my hair, smiles, stares. Mustard seeds in hot oil. Red flowers on high bare branches. Rivers and the sea. Peacocks and monkeys. Cheeky kids calling from the schoolyard. People everywhere, full of life. Horns in the background, when you're talking to someone on the phone. Red dust. I love it here. It's not mine, but I love it still.

This is love.

*

Two of the women in our community have been friends for many years. When you are around them you can feel it. It is a sigh of comfort that is tangible in the air. People who move around each other with ease. Ease does not come easily. There are years behind every pair of friends like this, years of misunderstanding each other to figure one another out.

I always have trouble with this part. I'll introduce myself, palms out. I will disappoint you. I will let you down. Do you still want to be friends?

Getting through the part where you are hurt and the other person is hurt and maybe there are even black streaks under your eyes. It's hard. But the ease is on the other side. Forgiveness, the love that covers a multitude of mistakes and glitches, these things are fertilizer. Friendship thrives in a place where forgiveness is practiced. It bursts into bloom, because love is larger than offense.

This is love.

*

And there is God, weaving through it like a ribbon, or digging right into the garden with his hands. The author of love. Smoothing the path toward love. Bringing things deeper suddenly, when we're least prepared. Taking all the tiny gifts of love we offer, holding them close to his heart, small though they are. Giving us everything in exchange for our nothings.

This is love.

*

I gave my husband a flower for Valentine's Day. I found it in the garden. He held it and said, "This is a perfect flower." And it was. That plant had never bloomed before-- a hibiscus of deep orange with a pink center. I said, "Happy Valentine's Day," and handed it to him. And I almost had to laugh, because in other years, when I was younger, I've been annoyed about not doing something for Valentine's Day. I've wished that I would be wined and dined, I've felt poor or grumpy.

Now I know that if I hadn't found the flower I could have sketched one for him, or written a poem about a hibiscus flower, or I could have done a little flowery dance.

Or I could have done nothing at all, because there's nothing you can really do to contain it, is there? It's all cheap and cute, next to real love. Nice, but not the real thing.

Real love flows and flows and flows. Real love bleeds and hurts and forgives, takes a break to swim for awhile. Real love grows.

Kerala retreat

So my dream of easy access to WiFi was just that: a dream. But the dream of rest and art and friendship has become a beautiful reality.

We've both been a bit worn down in the last year, but this week we've been laughing and eating, dreaming and adventuring (in adventures both planned and unplanned). Leaf and I are great traveling companions. We both love spontaneity, we love Indian things from the very simple Indian roadside food stall to the occasional splash of something a little more fancy, and we love quirky people, who we seem to meet everywhere we go. We've been on trains, in taxis, on a ferry, and in many, many auto rickshaws. We each encouraged the other to buy something that we looked fabulous in, despite it being a little beyond our regular budget. Like girls do.

Tomorrow I'll head home, rested and content, happy to hug my family, so thankful for my friend Leaf.

Bliss

I am on my way out the door for an adventure with a dear, dear friend.

Can you believe it? We get three full days of friendship and art, thinking and speaking, in beautiful Kerala.

I've never been to Kerala. I've never had this kind of time with Leaf.

I love India, I love travel, and I love the rare traveling without kids. I love friendship and art and eating new things.

I am very, very excited.

If I can get the wifi and get my iPad Squarespace app to work, I'd love to bring you along. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

No, no. Rewind, please.

Today we were eating lunch when YaYa said, "I wish I wasn't so funny looking."

My jaw landed in my palak paneer.

"What?" I said. I sputtered. She smiled, knowing where I was going with it. "You're probably the most beautiful person I've ever met. How can you say that?" (I can tell her that, since I'm her mother and she KNOWS I'm all about her brains and love and talent.)

She laughed. She's in between. I can sway her. I can convince her.

"I think my voice sounds weird on my body," Kid A offered.

"REALLY?" I squeaked. "I think you have an amazing voice." He shrugged, gave YaYa a little embarrassed smile.

"But," I said, tearing off a piece of chapatti. "I get it. I felt like that when I was a kid, too. I didn't like stuff about how I looked."

"Really?" YaYa said. "What stuff?"

"I think my voice sounds CUTE," Leafy said, and we all laughed.

"But Mama," YaYa said. "What didn't you like about how you looked?"

I hesitated, not wanting to run through the laundry list of complaints I used to have about young Rae Rae. I didn't want to tell about the way I hid my large nose behind my hand on the bus, the way I tried to hide my big feet. The kids in school mocking my profile, how I was ALL nose, until my face caught up. Too skinny, too tall. Weird hair. I didn't even want to say it out loud in front of my innocent kids.

"Um, well. I didn't want to have such curly hair," I said.

"Me too!" YaYa said. "That's what it is for me too!"

She's crazy, I thought. Her hair is gorgeous. People can't stop staring. But I think of how I used to tell my mother that I wanted a nose job, and my mother wisely told me that she'd help me get one when I turned eighteen, if I still wanted one. Of course, by the time I turned eighteen, thoughts of a nose job had evaporated into the same ether that took my concerns about having big feet floating off. Now the idea is laughable to me.

But still... my darling lovelies, wondering if they're good enough, if they're too weird. Self consciousness. It's beautiful and unforgiving, isn't it? It's the very tool that is helping them assess the world, figure things out, make beautiful art. But it shakes them in its teeth.

"Actually, that's why it's silly to think too much about how we look," I said. "If you feel like that, you should just look at the sky, the coconut trees, all the beautiful stuff around you."

And YaYa started laughing hysterically, and "I don't know why I'm laughing," she said, and I remember that too. Fits of giggles and giddiness. I love my bigger kids, how they're changing.

But I wish that I could blow self doubt right out into the ether. I can't. They'll have to learn how to do it themselves.