It's the day before Christmas in Portland, Oregon, and I am sitting in the cozy attic apartment of the folks who are taking care of my cat, Lucky. Most people wouldn't choose to come to Portland for a vacation at this time of year - it's been doing what Portland clouds do best, drizzling lightly and continuously, ever since I got here. The sun peeked through to transform the dried winter grass into shining golden straw at Smith and Bybee Lake a few days ago, where I watched the ducks in the water and overhead with my friend Elissa and her daughter, a toddler named Gracella. A friend even wrote to express envy of her imaginary vision of our sunny island Christmas in comparison with the Portland rain. She didn't know that we were secretly sharing that very moment under the same Oregon sky.
I'm getting used to feeling cold again - a foreign sensation now, necessitating frequent cups of tea and blessed hot showers (an immense luxury to a body accustomed to Nicaraguan plumbing). But the cold is only bone-deep. I don't feel the gloom of the long Northwest rainy season. On the contrary, being with old friends is like sitting in front of a fire that warms the soul. Watching friends living their ordinary lives, with their young children, is a delicious treat for my spirit. Why should this be? Every part of their existence seems novel and wondrous after a year living in Nicaragua. Their day-to-day struggles, triumphs, and disappointments are so far from the ones I have lived in the last twelve months.
It's 7:30 in the morning. I woke up at my usual campo hour, 5:30, but two hours later, the world is vastly dark outside. In Nicaragua, I'd have heard the continuous series of alarm bells by now - the early sunrise flooding the window next to my bed, the hundreds of roosters, the reggaeton music neighbors blast in order to cheer the morning, the whistles of farmers on their way to the harvest or shifting the cows around to a new grazing ground. The volcano Concepcion is throwing out so much ash these days that my house is coated in a fine layer of volcanic dust each morning on waking. I bike two towns up to get to work, or cram onto the chicken bus where my coworkers and I each morning count the ever-increasing number of pregnant women who have to stand to get to their prenatal checkup at the hospital where we're all headed. Each day the bus is fuller than the day before.
Are you writing? my ex-boyfriend asked me yesterday as I poured out the tale of grief and loss that has been my life for the last few months. No, I said - I can't even bear to open my current diary, half-finished, where I wrote about these experiences of death and separation. Somehow the blank slate of the computer screen is more welcoming today, and I can face it, write a few simple words, struggle to make sense of it all.
Who would have thought that life in the united states would have ever seemed appealing again, or easy and comforting? But that is what is happening to me. None of the material comforts matter to me, either. They are lovely, to be sure, but wholly unimportant. The life I envision for myself here, should I return to Portland, is one of working part-time at a community clinic, and taking a lot of long walks in the forest. Giving up that grief to the waterfalls and the giant trees and the healing plants. Spending time in front of that fireplace of friendship.