Something to write home about

A few days ago, I was invited to attend a small, private tasting at a Spanish restaurant here in Miraflores. The four of us - the editor, food critic, and photographer of a website for which I've written a couple of articles, plus me - sat down to taste and critique about one PM.

The editor was a multilingual Dane, the photographer an obscenely well-traveled American, and the English food critic the type of woman I might have loved if I hadn't immediately despised for her effortless stylishness and wit. Right away, I felt inexplicably as if my fingernails were dirty and I was terrified an “ain't” might slip out. When the food began arriving, that vague feeling of unsophisticated-ness morphed into full-on shame.

I'm not a big food person. I already knew that, but I didn't realize how limited were my powers of description when it comes to gastronomy until those three helpfully pointed it out to me. The first red flag leaped into view when the editor asked me what was my favorite Peruvian dish. The deer-in-headlights feeling that seized me pulled a foolish "Um, I like yucas" out of my mouth and brought a fleeting look of pity to the editor's face.

The rest of the tasting was no better. I listened to them swap unfamiliar adjectives about each dish and watched the food critic, Yvonne, take notes while the chef described their preparation. With every new taste, the exclamations of amazement became more frequent and pronounced. I tried everything that was offered and attempted to keep a pleasant expression on my face, but - due to both my inexperience and desperation to be gone - I really was not all that impressed with the food. Every time someone asked my opinion, I would fumble for a suitable response, give up, and resort to the stock response I learned in Ukraine that describes everything neither extraordinarily good nor outrageously bad: "It's as normal."

I kept thinking about my mom and my grandfather. Give my grandfather a pair of socks or a million-dollar check for Christmas, and his response is the same: "That's real good, doll." My mom's the same, only even less (if that's possible) loquacious in some ways. How was your day, Mom? "Fine." And that Everest trek/presidential debate you did? "OK." But the one thing my mom can and frequently does describe, with shudderingly vivid detail, is food. Usually things she doesn't like. A few scathing gems: "Looks like someone already ate it"; "Tastes like dog mess"; "Made me want to vomit". In some situations, these are funny; in others, exasperating. But everywhere outside of Georgia and family? Completely inappropriate.

In the midst of all the poshness, however, her breathtaking directness was all I could think of, and I decided to emulate her just in time for the chef to bring out a plate of squid - "cooked in its own ink!" The squid looked revoltingly like five leeches covered in thick, black tar. If there's anything more unappetizing this side of bodily excretions, I would like to see it. The others dug in enthusiastically, and I knew I had to do the same. The editor placed one of the fat, worm-like pieces on my plate and spooned extra ink over it, and I fought down a wave of nausea as I forced myself to cut a small chunk with my fork. Every cell of my being was shrieking in protest as I put the foul-looking stuff in my mouth and chewed once, twice, three times.

To my astonishment, it was good. Delicious, in fact. The flavor was so surprisingly appealing that I must have smiled, because the editor leaned over and said, "You like it, eh? How is it?" Here it was - my chance to offer some articulate commentary. I thought a moment, remembered my yuca gaffe, and decided to stay in character and channel my mum.

"It's great," I enthused. "Would make your tongue slap your brains out."

Ukraine is cold

Wrote this a while back. ¡Disfruta!

I knew what heat was. The thick, heavy, sticky heat of south Georgia, a constant part of my life for the first eighteen years of it, is both dreaded and welcomed, like an awkward but still-loved relative. In Key West, where I lived for two years, the heat is different, but just as oppressive, though the proximity of the Atlantic offers a quick cool-down to anyone with fifteen minutes to walk to the island's perimeter.

I knew heat, and my closet was packed with summer dresses, miniskirts, tank tops and flip flops. And I thought I knew cold. In Georgia, cold is a fashionable Gap peacoat over a long-sleeved henley, jeans and slightly flushed cheeks. In Georgia cold is negligible, a mild inconvenience like a particularly lengthy queue at the DMV or traffic on I-75.

Then I came face to face with the full, terrible, merciless fury of a Slavic winter. I arrived in Ukraine at the end of still-pretty-mild September and listened to my new colleagues and friends speak with resignation and gloom about the impending winter, and thought surely that they must be exaggerating somewhat. “Do you have a winter coat?” several of my students asked.

In fact, I did have a coat, one of the St. John's Bay variety from JC Penney, wool on the outside and insulated (the tag said) with down. As autumn drifted along and neared its close, I had settled in comfortably and was looking forward to the pretty, picturesque snow that native Georgians never get to experience. Fluffy white clouds would soon cover the ground. Perhaps we teachers would build snowmen on our days off, sled down nearby hills or just walk through the winter wonderland in downtown Marinsky Park.

When December descended upon the city of Kyiv, I became a convert. The fluffy white clouds I'd envisioned did not materialize; instead, two meters of grimy, dirty snow obstructed sidewalks and roads, the bottom six inches or so freezing permanently to the ground below.

This ice, the bane of every Kyivan winter, remains in place until late March, reducing the city's residents to slipping, sliding, knee-bruising (me), hip-breaking marionettes, their strings pulled by uncontrollable Mother Nature. There is no such thing as snow or ice removal in Kyiv, this and other aspects of the residents' well-being neglected as usual by the mayor, whose ineptitude and cocaine addiction are well-known and oft-ridiculed facts.

Among other things, winter is an especially good time to observe elements of Ukrainian culture that are often a combination of the bizarre and hilarious. The aforementioned absence of snow and ice removal make for entertaining (if you can see it that way) trips anywhere, especially with children in tow. The first time I saw a child-bearing sled dragged by the child's huffing, puffing, struggling parent, I was reminded of Santa Claus and his reindeer. I half-expected to hear the child, invariably bundled so tightly as to resemble a gingerbread man or starfish, cry out “Mush!” and brandish a whip.

On a similarly entertaining note, fashion in Ukraine is all-important, and not at all sacrificed to practicality during the winter months. Throughout October and November I made a passable attempt at stylish clothing and footwear, abandoning it altogether when the weather made it completely pointless and perhaps even life-threatening. Ukrainian women, known worldwide for their enviably sleek beauty and keen fashion sense, are not so deterred. Well into the freeze they can be seen shod in five- or six-inch stiletto heels, taking birdlike little steps and digging the point of the heel into the ice for a better grip. Perhaps it's taught at school, or simply inborn. At any rate, I never saw one of them fall.

Needless to say, winter in Ukraine is a strange time. The absence of the sun is total. There are no quick trips anywhere, not even to the kiosk twenty meters from your front door for a Coke. The cold is relentless, biting, cruel, harsh, even angry. You must cover every possible inch of flesh or risk illness or frostbite. The metro becomes a stinking, drafty hole filled with somehow-melted snow and ice that threatens one's balance at every yanking, jerking turn on the ride into downtown. A simple trip to the market becomes a two-hour epic adventure as you battle the wind, the crowds, the floodlike snowfall and of course the ice while you cling to your purchases through gloves so thick you'd think they would actually keep the cold out. Suicide, depression and alcoholism are common in the winter months and even considered normal reactions to a season that seems to go on interminably every single year.

And yet, most people – the ones who are not alcoholic, depressed or suicidal – seemed happy to me. I certainly was. Winter in Ukraine meant dangerous cold, snow, ice, heavy boots, mussed hair and blood-red cheeks, but it also meant constant house parties, nights with my best friend Jaemi after work at Puzata Hata (think Ryan's, but smaller and with beer) and one more opportunity to find out what I was really made of.

By the time I left in early June, I didn't have the wide Slavic features I'd come to know so well but I'd begun to feel more Ukrainian than American, fancying myself as tough and resilient as the people I'd lived among for nine months – people that fought through and survived centuries of hardship featuring a smorgasbord of poverty, war, foreign control and untold indignities preceding a decades-long nightmare under the suffocating and heavyhanded control of the Soviet Union. And I realized with surprise and pleasure that I now had more friends abroad than I'd ever had in the States. Even by mid-December, I knew that, in spite of the weather, I'd come to the right place.

El Carmen y La Familia Ballumbrosio

Afternoon. The air is hazy with dust and the warm, slightly oppressive rays of the mid-spring Peruvian sun. The plaza is still and strangely quiet, its loud, cheerful colors in startling contrast to the silence. The only sound on the mostly-deserted dirt streets is the occasional shout or laughter from the impromptu football game nearby. We leave the hotel – the only such establishment in the tiny, earthquake-battered hamlet of El Carmen – and begin the three-block journey to the house of the world-famous masters of Afro-Peruvian music and dance: the Ballumbrosios.

The walk is short but memorable. An acrid, pungent odor thickens the air and I am reminded of the unmistakable smell of the hog pen on the farm where I grew up. Piles of rocks and concrete fragments litter the dusty streets, which are lined with residences of crumbling brick. Some of the houses have been hastily repaired and reinforced, the residents making use of any and all available materials: garbage bags, tarps, sticks, bits of canvas. The earthquake that battered Peru's west coast in 2007 might have happened yesterday, instead of three years ago.

They know we're coming. As we approach the house at San Jose 325, the faint buzz of conversation grows to a pleasant roar. The door is open, and we file in without ceremony. The sensory assault that follows is unexpected. The walls are painted in alternating shades of rich mustard, rust, and, curiously, electric blue. Family photos cover nearly every inch of available wall space, and I can feel history staring out at me from every corner. The sharp, nostril-stinging aroma of carapulcra wafts in from the kitchen along with the sound of salsa music on the radio.

We take seats on the hard wooden benches along the wall and wait. It won't be long, I'm told, before someone gets a jam session going with the cajons (large, boxlike drums) that are stacked neatly in the corner. Soon enough, one of the kids – a girl of about eight, with milk chocolate skin and voluminous jet-black ringlets – hops atop one of the cajons, gives it a few testing little taps, and begins beating rhythmically away. Her hands fly over the polished, glossy wood in perfect time, and we sit transfixed for a minute or two, watching. But she is still a little girl: the effort cannot quite compete with the lure of her toys several meters away, and she abandons the cajon.

The original twelve children of Ballumbrosio patriarch Amador have all grown up; many of their children, teens and toddlers alike, now fill the family home. The majestic art of Afro-Peruvian dance and music seems to flow as naturally as blood through the veins of every one. Amador himself, folk violinist virtuoso and master of the ethnic tap dancing art of zapateo, was both a revered musical icon and a beacon of hope and happiness throughout his years – even when health problems forced him permanently into a wheelchair. The beloved musician, dancer, and father died in 2009.

Inside the family home, however, Amador's tradition lives on. In the evening, the entire clan assembles to give the neighborhood one of its frequent lively shows. We are lucky enough to secure a coveted spot on the worn but comfortable sofa and listen as Amador's eldest son, dressed entirely in white, speaks at length about the inception of Afro-Peruvian music, his father's legacy, and the importance of tradition. The introduction complete, he retreats to the back of the room, joining three other white-clad brothers, each as astride his own cajon, and the show begins.

The men beat the cajons in perfect rhythm for a few moments, the vibrations seeming the rattle the walls and our rib cages, until two of the dancers – females – emerge. They are barefoot, clad in frilly, midriff-baring bra tops and tiny skirts with colors that match the walls. Their limbs are a blur, each one's movements a mirror image of the others, and both are wearing an expression of simple delight. They perform their hip-shaking, torso-twisting dance at an impossibly frenetic pace, concentrated but smiling, while beads of sweat form on each cajon-playing man's forehead. For the next hour or so, we watch, rapt, while the women – six of them in all – rapidly and effortlessly contort their bodies in a fascinating display of speed and gracefulness and the men pound tirelessly upon their wooden instruments.

When the women have finished, the men treat the audience to a thrilling zapateo show. Each gives a solo performance, filling the air with rhythmic stomping and tapping on the unadorned stone floor. The men wear similar expressions of pleasure and concentration, absorbed in the effort of creating such unique music.

Some time later, with a collective bow and a chorus of “Gracias!”, the show ends. The room has grown warm from the feverish exertion of the talented human bodies of the Ballumbrosio children and grandchildren. We rise slowly, still feeling the show's lingering vibrations inside. I look down at my scribbled notes and realize that it will take days to satisfactorily relate my experience in the house of Amador Ballumbrosio. The overwhelming richness of it all reminds me of the first bite of extra dark chocolate – the flavor is striking, intense, and unfamiliar, but nonetheless addictive and somehow luxurious. As long as there are Ballumbrosios in El Carmen, I decide, the beauty and joy of their craft will ease the devastation and hardship beyond the front door of the little house on Calle San Jose.

Feelin' Peru-vy

On the fourteenth floor of an office building on Avenida Benavides in Miraflores is a sleek wooden desk where I’ve spent five of every seven days since arriving in Lima six weeks ago. The desk – my desk – looks out over the lively streets and various edificios of squeaky-clean Miraflores. From this considerable height, I can see the Pacific Ocean on a clear day, but even fourteen floors is not enough to mute the cacophony of screeching brakes and blaring horns below.

The chair at my desk at work is one of the ancient, permanently forward-tilted, rolling variety. A dirty sticker on the back sings its ergonomically-designed praises, but I’m not buying it. Attempted adjustment of the chair revealed that its little gears were inexorably stuck in their present position, endowing the chair with all the flexibility of a boat hull. And it really hurts my back.

After three weeks of dating (and witnessing my back pain), Sam in characteristic generosity surprised me on my birthday last weekend with a stuffed teddy bear and a gift certificate for an hour-long massage at Esther Bella, a local spa. I named the bear Sam, Jr., and instructed the original Sam to make an appointment for the following Saturday.

Saturday arrived, and on the way to the spa I rehearsed the Spanish greeting and few lines I’d planned to make myself sound comfortably bilingual. It didn’t work. I walked confidently up to the receptionist, promptly forgot everything I had memorized and stood there foolishly for a moment. She looked at me expectantly. “Hola”, I said lamely, and thrust the gift certificate at her without another word. She smiled and took it, obviously accustomed to dealing with foreigners, and motioned me to take a seat. A few minutes later I met my “masseuse”.

She was both younger and much shorter than I, a diminutive little thing with a cheerful smile and tiny hands. She indicated that I should follow her up the stairs (“Pasa, señorita!”) and we entered a small, dark chamber with another staircase, this one narrow and spiral-shaped. The first hint of unease began to creep into my consciousness, but I brushed it away. I followed her up the next staircase to an even darker and smaller room above. She handed me an obviously-unwashed robe of thin, blue cotton and managed to intimate that I should go into the bathroom and change.

When I emerged, clutching my bag, shoes and clothing, she was waiting in a room just beyond the bathroom with a translucent sliding glass door. The lights had been dimmed and I could smell incense burning, making the atmosphere faintly romantic. Storage for personal possessions was not immediately apparent, so I piled my things in a heap in the corner by the door and climbed onto the table. With a combination of gestures and unintelligible Spanish, she instructed me to disrobe and lie down. I paused. Take off the robe? Just like that? I am not uncomfortable with nudity or with my own body, but I had the sudden sinking feeling that Sam had paid for much more than what I wanted. The phrase “happy ending” surged incoherently to the front of my thoughts and for one panic-filled second I contemplated a precipitous exit. A moment later, however, my innate writer’s curiosity got the better of me. Slowly, I removed the robe and lay back, completely exposed.

I closed my eyes and waited. She turned on music – strange and highly stylized instrumental versions of 80s pop – and for the first time since leaving my house, I relaxed: “Billie Jean” and “Karma Chameleon” in any form were surely not her way of setting a sexy mood. A sweet but cheap-smelling fragrance filled the air, and a moment later I felt her tentative touch on my instep.

She rubbed my feet lightly, almost distractedly, for several long minutes. Then I heard a faint squirting noise and her hands were on my shins. If I had anticipated a weak, light touch because of her size, I was at least partially wrong. My eyes remained closed as she dug in and made the same stroke over and over: fingers curved around my legs, she pushed down, up and back so many times that it became painful. Every stroke produced a terrible, anguished-sounding “err, eeh” from the table. She did not replenish the oil, but the little that made its way onto my legs was, I’m convinced, lodged forevermore in the follicles. I thought wildly that perhaps she would permanently retard the growth of hair on my legs and I’d never again have to shave.

Not soon enough, she moved to my torso. At least half of the oil she squirted onto her palm landed unnoticed on my right cheek. Still fully uncovered, I braced myself. She moved behind my head and began “massaging” my abdomen. Then, to my utter astonishment, she placed one hand on each of my breasts and squeezed. Hard. Too stunned even to react, I lay inert as she proceeded to trace rapid circles around them with a finger.

At that point, I resigned myself to bearing the pain and discomfort with fortitude and determination to remember every single detail of the experience. Her ministrations were reminiscent more of the awkward fumblings of a well-meaning boyfriend than a professionally-trained masseuse. I kept wondering how much Sam had paid, eventually concluding that for the privilege of such ungoverned abuse she should probably be paying me. At the end, she approached the front of the table, tapped my forehead and, when I opened my eyes, smiled sweetly and sang out, “Finish!”

I sat up slowly, feeling as if I had somehow sustained a full-body rug burn, and noticed without surprise that another client – also completely nude - had been installed on the adjoining table. I glanced around for the blue robe; it was nowhere in sight. After a moment of searching, the masseuse produced it from the floor in the corner beyond the other table and handed it to me triumphantly. There was a dust bunny on the shoulder, two curly black hairs tangled in the fibers at the neck and a yellowish, wet-looking stain at the armpit that I hadn’t noticed before. With a failed attempt at masking my disgust, I took the robe and dropped it on the table beside me. Gathering my aplomb, I walked to the corner, collected my things and made my way to the bathroom, noting in the mirror the ridiculous appearance of my hair: a scalp massage with her oil-covered fingers had rendered my normally straight, fine hair as poufy as a ‘60s beehive.

I was a couple of blocks down Larco before the full comicality of the situation struck me and I wished suddenly that Sam were there to laugh with me. Later that night, relating the experience as we walked from my flat to his, he was and he did. And I realized that he managed - inadvertently - to give me a far greater gift than a simple massage. His gift gave me the chance to grow: as a writer, as an expat, as a human. It let me see that he could laugh at things that might throw other men into a fit of insecurity. It reassured me that I could be honest with him, and that means more to me than all the happy endings in the world.

My back does still kinda hurt, though.

Lima is.

Here's a traveler's mantra I formulated about a year ago: if you want to get a good idea of country's personality, get a local to take you shopping. Real shopping.

I tested this theory in Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, with fully satisfactory results. The Poles, friendly enough but wary of and slightly impatient with foreigners, typically avoid eye contact but make no attempt at a rip-off. Thus, I deduced that Poland is a land of generally honest and warm but guarded individuals. Ukrainians, on the other hand, snap and grumble their inevitable impatience and adopt coercive tactics to make the sale – evidence, at least in my opinion, of their centuries of experience with being screwed themselves. Turks are ingratiatingly helpful - almost obsequious - but insincerely so. Shopping for dresses with M in the giant textile region of Istanbul, I must have tried on clothes in fifteen different stores, each time finding myself the recipient of fake smiles, a dozen “suggestions” hung over the fitting room door and gushing exclamations regarding my striking beauty. This last was reason enough to label the whole country a bunch of shameless frauds, but I didn't. I did, however, leave with the impression that Turkey is a land of shrewd, pragmatic opportunists.

Today I went shopping in Lima.

I should note that I live in Miraflores, the picturesque, touristy part of Lima where the Westerners and wealthy locals congregate. Nothing there, I am told, is representative of Peru or even Lima. There is shopping in Miraflores, of course, the prices absurdly inflated and the shops almost exclusively Western. Buildings seem to be colorful expressions of individualism rather than functional structures. Parks and gardens are obsessively manicured and feature dozens of fastidiously maintained flower beds, the brilliantly multihued occupants of which are always arranged in the shape of a heart or some such. The locals are friendly, smiling and helpful. Of course I want to shop there. But I didn't move here to spend a year in a gilded little bubble.

After a bone-jarring bus ride into wherever it was we actually went, I and my three companions – one of my roommates and two local girls – debarked to the standard Peruvian symphony of blowing horns and screeching brakes. I looked around and realized I must have entered the “real” Lima: the surrounding buildings were forlorn, crumbling structures painted drab greens and grays. Trash littered the sidewalks and black, grimy water pooled in jagged holes in the decades-old pavement. Traffic was worse than any I'd seen before and seemingly undirected by man or machine. The air smelled simultaneously acrid and stale, a slightly-nauseating mixture of body odor, garbage, fried food and urine. Toothless street vendors accosted us immediately, offering a cheap assortment of men's undershirts, wallets, hairbrushes and jewelry.

As we entered the market, I realized how very, very big the place actually was. It must have spanned ten blocks in both directions, packed to the absolute limit with shoppers and vendors alike. The outdoor shops, generally about the size of a standard American living room, were crammed haphazardly onto each block, generously decorated with signs declaring DESCUENTOS and OFERTAS. The indoor shops – each really just a kiosk space, about the height and width of a bunk bed, inside a large mazelike warehouse – spilled onto their neighbors. The shop assistants were aged and tired-looking, their responses and faces the very embodiment of indifference.

What really got my attention were the mannequins – at least five of them to each shop. In the States, mannequins are one of the very few remaining solely utilitarian objects. Measurements are standardized and reasonably normal, and the “hair” is generally a few cursory waves incised as part of the structure itself. The Peruvian mannequins, on the other hand, are fiberglass monuments to sex and highly idealized feminine beauty. Heavily made-up, impossibly narrow-waisted, big-boobed and voluptuous, the mannequins' glittering, lidless stare followed us throughout each labyrinthine warehouse. We chanced to wander through the kids' section and I stopped, appalled, when I noticed “Sexy Kids!” emblazoned across one shop's exterior. Inside were miniature versions of the earlier mannequins, clad in appropriately kid-like garb but stuffed with newspaper in the hip area to create the illusion of womanly curves. That, in fact, really was nauseating.

Navigation was tricky. I tried to follow Melina, one of the locals, but lost her repeatedly in the swarm of females of similar (identical?) height, hair length, and clothing. “Kate!” Courtney would yell, having managed somehow to keep up, and I'd fumble to locate the direction of her voice and rejoin the othes. It was impossible to walk in a straight line and at some moments even to move, crowded as it was and as hard as we tried to avoid the brash, aggressive street vendors. “Gringa”, several of them sneered at me, gesturing lewdly and laughing all the while. I've seen too much to be offended by so little but was nonetheless repulsed.

Unattended children were everywhere, some of them mere toddlers. They squatted, barefoot, in the rare open spaces and played with dirty toys. Others wandered about uncertaintly with a bereft expression. Some just huddled in doorways and looked out imploringly at the passing crowd.

Courtney and I, uninitiated outsiders and accustomed to a decidedly more spacious retail environment, tired of the excursion within an hour, I'm slightly ashamed to say. By the time the four of us reached the street and Melina found a cab, I had developed a massive headache and a grouchy mood. The jostling, the shoving, the constant malodorous contact and the welter of emotions I felt regarding the experience made me anxious to get away and get alone.

As we eased into the late afternoon traffic and joined the cars heading back toward Miraflores, I noticed a campaign billboard overhead. Mayoral elections are being held in Lima in November, I think, and the candidates are campaigning hard. This billboard, featuring a candidate whose name I cannot recall, proclaimed, in patriotic red and white, “SOMOS PERU!” We are Peru.

After today, I cannot (or perhaps just don't want to) say anymore that my little mantra is correct. I don't want it to be. Who is Peru? Two weeks into my one-year stay, I don't yet know. I may not ever. I never wanted or intended to come to South America. My experience with Spanish-speaking cultures is confined to the Latin Foods aisle at Wal-Mart and the kitchen staff at every restaurant I've ever worked at. I don't know who Peru is. I do, however, know who I don't want her to be, and that is the stinking, broken, cheap, wholly undignified world I stepped into today.

I returned home this evening to the clean streets and placid cheerfulness of Miraflores, feeling uneasily as though I'd glimpsed the proverbial emperor's nudity. And looked away quickly.

But not quickly enough.

Pause

Tonight I am staying at my grandparents' house for the first time in quite a long while. Years, in fact. The last time I slept in this bed – once my aunt's – I was in high school. I graduated eight years ago, I'm surprised to realize tonight. These intervening eight years have seen me off to college, a mere three hours away, down (in every sense of the word) to Key West, across the ocean several times to Europe and God knows where else. As I brushed my teeth tonight, looking into the mirror in the bathroom that has smelled and looked the same since the beginning of my relatively young memory, I was struck by how little things here have changed. The mile or so of dirt road leading to my grandparents' house is just as dusty, with just as many deer lurking on the corners and just as many (more?) paint-chipping rocks that seem to jump up off the road when you accelerate past fifteen miles per hour. As a high school student, driving with inordinate pride my freshly-washed 1998 green Civic EX, it took me about twenty minutes to drive that distance, so slowly did I drive in a vain effort to avoid accumulating any red Georgia dust on the rims. The dogs, Lily and Tamar, are the same. They still beg shamelessly for any and all food, they still whine like the spoiled, pampered little things they are when my grandmother pretends to insist that they “go night-night” and shuts the door to the washroom. And my grandmother, for her part, still tells fragmented stories – heavily interspersed with sidenotes – about her childhood, my grandfather, their courtship, our family, the dogs and anything else that has managed to make a blip on her radar. Someone who doesn't know her would have a hard time following, but I get it. So does everyone else that shares my surname.

Despite all this underwhelming sameness, the one thing that has clearly, starkly changed is of course me. I've grown past my childish need for attention and recognition for my maverick-ness and iconoclast status, and I'm content to be who I am and let my grandparents do the same. We don't need to argue about politics, religion, science or anything related to my parents' divorce. Many things in the past year or so have disappeared from the list of things that I consider of vital importance, and I'm happy to say that it's made life easier and far more enjoyable. I learned in Ukraine how to let petty inconveniences slide, and in Turkey M showed me how to be happy because of them, rather than in spite of. Tonight I listened to my grandma recount her one year of independent living in Savannah, working at the telephone company for a dollar an hour and bravely walking home in the pitch darkness at the dangerously late hour of nine PM. She told me about the letters her father sent her mother when he was forced to find work in Atlanta, a distant Gomorrah some two hundred miles to the northwest of little Collins, Georgia, and the five dollars he included in one letter, admonishing my great-grandmother to “make sure you give twenty-five cents to the church”. Then she listened to me talk about my upcoming internship in Peru, a copy writing gig that I desperately wanted and got.

I had a good time tonight, and you know something? I really didn't want to come at all.

There is not very much about my formative years that I remember (or remember clearly), and what I do recall in general I would just as soon forget. I was not abused or neglected; on the contrary, I was loved fiercely by four of the five people I now consider my family (the outlier being my brother, who didn't come around to realizing my wonderfulness until a few years ago) and cherished perhaps a bit too much. But there was tension in my home so thick and oppressive you could nearly see it, tiredness and sorrow in my mother's eyes and a general sense of unease. When I think of home in those years, I mostly remember feeling inexplicably as if I were in the way. Physically. You know when someone is carrying something heavy and coming your way, and you momentarily have that Quick-which-way-do-I-go feeling? That's the feeling I most associate with growing up.

All that being said, there are happy things I do remember: fishing with my grandpa in the pond behind my aunt's house; watching the Braves in the mid-90s at my grandparents'; Saturday mornings at the house I grew up in, playing a game my brother and I called SpyTech (played by running in a crouched position around the house and peeking into various windows to see where our parents were); and any time at all spent with my mother. These are experiences that seem like nothing, in fact at the time they might even have seemed tiresome and boring, but in retrospect they take on a gilded quality that makes me wish with all my soul I had understood how precious they were and appreciated them more. But what, really, does that even mean? Did I appreciate my grandfather taking me fishing on a day when he could have been in the fields getting work done? Probably not. Kids don't look at things that way. Did I stop in the middle of the 1995 World Series to reflect on what an exciting time we as a family were all having together? At eleven years old? I'm afraid not.

I'm about two months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, and this year's changes have included a very real, very potent sense of my and everyone else's mortality. When you're a teenager, and even in your early twenties, it still seems as if life will go on forever the way it always has. Yes, you'll grow on up, have a career and kids or whatever, but parents, grandparents and other longstanding presences will simply remain as they seemingly always have. Then you hit twenty-five and you realize that you won't be young forever after all, and the burdensome weight of adulthood settles heavily on your shoulders, and you attempt to internalize and deal with the cold, stark reality of time, money, work, death and taxes. There are decisions to make, dreams to chase, thoughts to think, and “all the while”, as Millay wrote, “death beating the door in”.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point, which I already mentioned: I didn't want to come tonight, but I did. I came, after all, because despite the discomfort which I associate with childhood, the dirt road and searing boredom I often experience here, this place, at least, has not changed. Here the dirt road is still dusty. Here the gardenia bushes still bloom. Here my grandparents – my good, devoted grandparents – live as they always have, far removed from the cacophony of “town” and most of the complications of this huge, lonely planet. Here I can get, if not peace, at least a temporary respite from a world that is so constantly moving, changing, churning, giving and taking without a moment's notice.

I travel because I love that change. But even the greatest adventurers need a break. Even history's most noted explorers went home occasionally. Tonight, sleeping for the first time in nearly a decade in a house which has not noticeably changed in twenty-six years, driving down a dirt road that will never be paved, having conversations I've had my whole life – I feel just a little bit safer. Time, money, work, death and taxes are distant realities that I'll deal with tomorrow. But not tonight. Tonight I just want to rest.

Eve

"My heart is what it was before".

Millay wrote that numb, dejected line back in the first half of the twentieth century, somewhere between Maine and Vermont. In her fifty-eight years, she had more than her fair share of failed relationships, romantic trysts, sexual misadventures and personal tragedy. But she is my hero. She poured her heart unabashedly onto page after tear-stained page, daring the world to judge her for so readily jumping head-first into the grittiest, rawest, most passion-filled life she could find. She was plagued throughout life by alcoholism and heartbreak and devastating loss, experiences which no doubt gutted her emotionally but also helped produce what is without question some of the best poetry of the last century. She was a wild, Pulitzer Prize-winning professional success and a bitter personal failure. So why do I admire her so much? Because she knew what she wanted, and she spent every moment of her almost-six decades chasing it.

Six days shy of my permanent departure from Ukraine, my heart is most definitely not what it was before. The past eight months have passed in a blink, or a pounding heartbeat, as swift as a morning commuter's glance on the metro, and they have left me utterly changed. Part of me feels purged. Part of me feels newly burdened with sadness at leaving the people who may well be the first real, true friends I've had and managed to keep. The other parts of me just feel ... grateful. And happy. It's hard to leave what's familiar, but even harder to leave a place where I've been happy in a way I'd never known before. Happy in a free, easy way that came as naturally as breathing, without much, if any, effort from me. Ukraine hasn't asked any more of me than I was willing or able to give, which is why it has been so easy to give, and give, and give some more, until my heart is at once bursting and empty and thirsting for more.

I'm twenty-five years old, and it has taken me nearly all of that time to realize and admit to myself what I want, which is to pour my own brand of barely-restrained passion onto the pages of whatever publication I can find. Next week will be Turkey. July will be Taiwan. August, if I'm lucky, will be Peru. But wherever I am, I'll take with me the lightness and freedom I found in Ukraine. The friendships will remain, the memories will take deeper root and every day I'll be closer to becoming the person I was born to be.

No, my heart is changed. It's bigger now, and stronger. It beats cheerfully and without fear. It knows what it wants.

Millay would be proud.