It was cold and rainy outside, but warmth and festivity bloomed through the front door as we entered.  I took [...]]]> While in Canada last month, Jeni and I were invited to a barbeque at her roommate Mia’s parents’ house.  “We have to go, Susan.  This isn’t any old backyard barbeque.  This is a Filipino barbeque!”

It was cold and rainy outside, but warmth and festivity bloomed through the front door as we entered.  I took off my shoes in the foyer and gave Mia’s diminutive – in everything but voice and presence – mom a hug.  She talked my feet into house sandals (chinelas), and told me they were mine to keep: I could take them home!  The women, Mia, her sister Liza, aunts, and cousins, lounged in the parlor, on couches and floor pillows, cracking the shells of pistachio nuts with their teeth and laughing.  Mia handed me a beer, and I followed her into the kitchen to throw away the bottle top.  The thin sandals made me shuffle, but were a blessing against the cold, tile floor.

“We don’t have Fs in our language.”  Back in the parlor, Mia’s mom leaned against Jeni’s leg, slapping it as she poked fun at her own accent.  “Or Vs, either.  So we say P!  Pfive-pipfdy-pfour, good bargain!”  Mia’s mom was a social worker in the Philippines, and when she first immigrated to Vancouver she ran a halfway house for mental patients out of her own home.  The house has eight bedrooms, with intercoms, large bathrooms, and multiple lounge areas.  Jeni lived with Mia and her family while in nursing school.  She tossed remembered Filipino phrases into her jokes as the banter swirled through the room.  A cousin pointed animatedly as she told the story of a ninety-four-year-old grandmother who could still read without glasses, who stumbled upon the steamy romance novel left behind by a housekeeper.  ”She was reading it out loud, and she read several paragraphs before it seemed to sink in, exactly what she was reading,” she mimed a highly offended sensibility throwing the book aside as if it had sprouted the same body parts described in the pages.  Mia’s mom howled and slapped Jeni’s leg again.

Platters of food appeared.  Piles of chicken on skewers, barbecued shrimp, marinated pork.  The men, too shy to join the women’s circle on the first floor, had been busy on the upstairs porch.  This is nothing, I was assured.  For a child’s birthday party in the Philippines, two roasted pigs!  For Easter, weddings, holidays, more than I could imagine.  Desert came later: green coconut shredded with pandan leaf jello and served with coconut ice cream.  Less traditional sweets were paraded in front of me as well.  Mia’s mom asked if I wanted to try her Nanaimo bars.  She bought them from the store herself!  “I not good cook,” she grinned and placed another of the chocolate, coconut and cream confections onto my plate.

Stomachs groaning, Jeni and I drove home through the rain.  She talked about her trip to the Philippines with Mia, five years ago.  ”It was my first backpacking trip!”  I “awwwwed”, and nodded.  The first place is the one that shines the brightest in the memory.  She told me about the stupid, naive, wonderful things she did, how willing she was to be without luxury, how immense and how possible the world seemed.  ”I went mountain biking with this Dutch guy I met.  We stopped on a beach and he climbed a tree to get a young coconut, and we sawed at the holes with my Swiss army knife and drank the juice right out of the top.  On the night before I flew home, I didn’t want to pay the $4 for a hostel, so I slept in front of the airport on a bench.  I had an alarm clock that looked sort of like a phone, so someone tried to steal it, but once they realized what it was they threw it back.”  A red light turned green, and we drove for a few blocks.  “I think that’s why it’s so hard to live a normal, day-to-day life.  Once you’ve drunk coconut milk straight from the tree, you know, or things like that, real life seems so pale.”  I nodded again.  I understood.

I moved back to Salt Lake a couple of weeks ago, into my room in the big, full, family house where I rent.  I love the feel of infusing a space with my own energy, seeing the empty walls fill with color and the bare furniture become mine.  I start with music.  I put my laptop out of the way and turn it up while I empty boxes and hang clothes.  The computer’s screen saver is set to a slide show program that displays all of the pictures on my laptop’s hard drive at random.  It’s my favorite TV show.  Wintry skiing scenes from Utah fade into Patagonian glaciers, tangled jungle greenery, or pictures of my backpack at trailheads across New Zealand.  Sunsets from the bottom of the world morph into bright orange flames between ponderosa pines, and the full moon shines unchanged over mountains on four continents.  Pausing for a few minutes to watch, I’m transported.  It’s hard to believe that some of these pictures were taken five years ago, and easy to get lost in the past.  Real life is hard after living out of a car in New Zealand, or floating down the Amazon in a cargo boat, especially when the years intervene to brighten the good memories and soften the bad.  But I do remember the moments – or weeks, or months – when I questioned my reasons for being on the road, when I felt low and uninspired and unappreciative of my very unreal life.  Getting to the places where I could create those brilliant memories was hard, too.

Decorating is the last step to making a room my own.  Feather and seed necklaces from the Amazon, postcards from Wyoming and Chile, a wall-hanging I inherited in Antarctica, the hand-woven rug I bought in Peru; these find their way into place, linking this new space with all of the places I’ve been in the last five years.  As wonderful as it is to be surrounded by these memories, however, I am trying hard not to end up as the person who talks only about their glory days when those days are thirty years gone.  The glory days are every day, if I chose to see them that way.  When I am an old woman, I want people to see the photos and artifacts on my walls and the exotic jewelry on my wrists, but to hear me talk about my latest home improvement project, the play I saw last week, the trip I’m taking next month, not the same stale tales of hitchhiking in Argentina fifty years ago.  I need to stop defining myself by what I’ve done but instead by what I’m doing.  And so, on the wall over my desk, I’ve pinned a photo of my fire crew and our trucks from last summer; on the fridge is a snapshot of Chris and me on the top of Mt. Timpanogos, and another of us at Hampton Beach is next to my computer.  A handmade pottery cup I bought from a ski instructor friend holds my pens.  And those chinelas: I think of Mia and her family every time I wear them.  And I wonder if maybe the Philippines will be the next place on my forward journey…

I will post again!

…at the end of December.  At the moment, I am at home, in between adventures.  My writing efforts are currently focused on polishing and publishing, and my mental energies are directed at networking and [...]]]> who continue to check (and check, and check, and check) this page to see if I’ve updated:

I will post again!

…at the end of December.  At the moment, I am at home, in between adventures.  My writing efforts are currently focused on polishing and publishing, and my mental energies are directed at networking and researching.  These next two months are a part of “Operation: Get Stuff Published”.  It’s a difficult mission, involving hours of concentrated work and all the intense frustration of writer’s block, interrupted by moments of inspired glory.

If you have suggestions, words of encouragement, possible publishing connections, want to tell me which is your favorite story from my travels (and why), or just want to say hello, send me an email:

susanmunroe@gmail.com

As always, I’d love to hear from you, and hope you’ll join me again at the end of the year, when I take on my next trip:

December 29 – SOUTH AMERICA

Stay tuned!

One word: weird.

Good, more than good, but jeez louise, odd as.  Arrived in Cali Monday afternoon, and spent that night, Tuesday and Wednesday nights with Beeker in San Jose.  Heat!  Cars!  People!  People! The entire freakin’ population of NZ in one city!  Can you say ‘culture shock’?  Driving back from the airport, [...]]]> …jiggedy jig.

One word: weird.

Good, more than good, but jeez louise, odd as.  Arrived in Cali Monday afternoon, and spent that night, Tuesday and Wednesday nights with Beeker in San Jose.  Heat!  Cars!  People!  People! The entire freakin’ population of NZ in one city!  Can you say ‘culture shock’?  Driving back from the airport, every time we turned a corner or paused at an intersection, my brain started convulsing, telling me “Wrong side of the road, wrong side!”, making me twitch and mutter involuntarily, expecting a horrible head on crash at any moment.  Later, seeing Jay Leno on TV, I was amazed, commenting, “Wow, we don’t usually get him on TV2, do we?”  Slowly, slowly things began to fall into place, and after the first 24 hours I could accept and recognize that I was no longer in NZ.  Which drew me to the inevitable, cringing understanding that I was in America.  Each Hummer, each waving flag, each “support our troops” ribbon and Wal-Mart billboard I saw hit me like a graffitied brick wall: painful and offensive.  I think I was born to be an ex-pat.

Homecoming, true homecoming occurred several days later – in the wee hours of Friday morning, after a satisfyingly tearful family reunion and a two hour drive from the Boston airport.  Home, however, no longer exists in reality as it does in my twenty-three years of memories.  There’s a new house, for one thing, a gorgeous, stylish and comfortable palace that my parents have been pouring their hearts and souls into for the past year.  It’s beautiful, a true accomplishment, and their pleasure and happiness at finally crossing the threshold of their dreams is apparent in their glowing faces as they give me the grand tour.  For me it means another unfamiliar kitchen in which I will hunt for knives and napkins, another new bed, another bathroom sink on which to rest my toiletry bag.  “Home” suddenly seems lost, impossible and inaccessible.  Framed photographs, small knick-knacks, a rocking chair, a blanket: old friends in a sea of new faces that give me something to cling to as I ride the waters of change.  How to reconcile a need for familiarity with a thirst for travel and newness?

I have changed; it is difficult to see the same change in others, people and places.  Change requires strong countenance – but how can the branches grow toward the sun if the roots too seek the sky?  I am learning: the branches and the roots spring from one heart.  Change in one must create change in the other, for the support goes both ways, big step building on bigger step, multiplying exponentially until roots and branches both can feel alive, fulfilled.  Home, it seems, is truly no further than the heart, for it is from there that love, succor, and companionship dwell.  And my heart?  It’s here, with my family, with my friends.  New house, new jobs, new lives aside, I am grateful for the opportunity to brace myself against their familiarity, to draw strength from their stalwartness and feel inspired by their own transformations.  And my heart is far away, over the seas and under a different sky, waiting quietly while I drink my fill, waiting for me to return, ready to set sail once more.  Balance, duality, adapting, learning…

August 13th is the shipping date; leaving on a jet plane from Manchester, NH at 9:00 AM.