some Costa Rica recollections

(Katelin, this post is for you, when you return from halfway across the world.)

This afternoon I was thinking about Costa Rica. Maybe it was because Wenham has finally, finally delivered summer and today we laid outside for as many hours as possible. The feel of burning skin is so delicious now, I think because we feel entitled to it after looking at our pasty selves for many months. Anyway, we were burned beyond all reason in Costa Rica so maybe that was what made me remember.

I was thinking about how the four of us - Katelin, Jeff, my dad and I - sat in a warm wooden room with no walls, the pizza shop of Santa Theresa, talking over pepperoni and Sprite in bottles. We talked about what happens when a child dies before the parents, and about long-distance dating, and friends' grief, and we twirled the Sprite bottle caps between our thoughtful fingers.
In the morning we shuffled dusty feet to the Ginger Cafe for breakfast, humidity and high temperatures already breaking through the early hours.
Silly orange and purple crabs scuttled back and forth across the dirt road, and I imitated the motion to make my dad laugh. Only half the crabs, on average, made it across and the brown dirt was spotted with flattened shells of brilliant orange and purple.
One night we ate dinner at a man named Frederick's house. He was French, a surfer who had relocated from France to Australian to this obscure town. His house was also a restaurant and he could check the waves from his second story windows. We were the only customers so he sat and talked with us on the deck, over fresh pasta and under twinkle lights. His wife was pregnant and came out to say hi before heading back to help out in the kitchen. I think all of us sometimes dream of a life like that...leaving once place and being okay with where you end up so long as you can live out a passionate life there.
I miss Central America's expansive, carnivalesque sunsets. The most brilliant sunset during our time there happened on the afternoon I forgot to bring my camera to the beach. We stood tilted and admiring the sky, and I couldn't leave to get the camera because I wanted to watch all the colors meld, and each cloud rearrange. Somehow I worried I might forget the sunset if I didn't have a picture, which is probably just a sign of my own pack-rat ways, but in any case I remembered it today, two years later.

I love being able to see these Costa Rican days again so clearly. Maybe they were just so vibrant - the heat and saturated woven cloth and melty ice cream - that they stand out against other thoughts, or maybe they're just a really beautiful series of days in my little treasure trove of memories. Whatever the case, it was a good reminder of this life's many blessings, recollections that swam in all at once this afternoon.