Return - Part 1 of 3

(Ecuador trip, March 2011: Part 1)

The officer checking my passport looked at the computer screen, at my passport, and then back at me with an odd look in his eye. Not sure if I had popped up in the system because my old resident ID card was long expired or because my passport picture would make anyone suspicious of my moral fiber, I tried a feeble joke: “Yeah, I know... I left for 3 years and came back 27 years later – I’m on Ecuadorian time.”

He rolled his eyes slightly, chuckled and stamped the page, allowing me entry to the country I grew up in and left a lifetime ago.

“Ecuadorian time”: one of the many benefits of being raised abroad is that you have an automatic set of excuses for doing things differently than those around you. When I lived in Ecuador, I hid the fact that I’m a lousy soup-maker by blithely serving meals “American style” – i.e., without the soup that customarily precedes the “plato seco” or entrée. In the USA, my habitual inability to properly gauge the amount of time any given activity will occupy gets merrily swept into the catch-all “Ecuadorian time” excuse. (Honesty prompts me to admit that the only one doing so merrily has been me. Most other people are generally less than amused.)

I should know better than to make jokes at airports. When leaving DFW, I was picked for the body scan. As I stepped out of the scanner, I joked to the young lady scrutinizing my image, “So... how much weight do I need to lose?” A look of concern rushed over her face and she stammered, “Oh, no, ma’am, you look just fine to me!”

My brother-in-law, Germán, picked my friend Arline and me up at the Quito airport. The city’s energy hit me in the chest. I wasn’t sure if I was huffing and puffing more from nostalgia or from the fact that I’m 50 and out of shape and not used to the altitude anymore. A few minutes later, we pulled up in my sister’s driveway; they have two houses, one where they live and the other where Germán’s sister, 75-year-old Teresa, lives. Teresa rushed out and hugged me ecstatically, glanced at my years of accumulated baby fat (mine, my kids’, my grandkids’...) and scolded, “What did you go and do that to yourself for?” Then she pulled me in for another bear hug. Political correctness has not yet run amok there and it felt good.

I like living in the slight disfocus that makes the lines between worlds become permeable. Does it get lonely in no-man’s land, where divisions of geography, culture and language are blurred? For some, perhaps. But for me, it’s Home. With a capital H.

We drove down to the cloud forest hamlet of Mindo the next day, Germán, my sister Becky, Arline and me. I cracked open the window, took a deep breath and announced, “It smells right!” I don’t know what I was expecting. It was just nice that all the old smells of tangled forests and tiny towns were so familiar. We stopped in Nanegalito – even the name is fun to say – and had huge, delicious cheese empanadas with fritada. As I bit into my first Ecuadorian empanada in more than a quarter century, I thought, “These are real empanadas - no wonder no one ate the ones I took to the Christmas party last year...”

When I moved to the USA in my twenties, I expected to return within 3 or 4 years. My brothers lived in the USA; my sister lived in Ecuador and so would I. That was my plan: always a foot (or a sibling with a spare bedroom) in the country where I didn’t reside.

In Mindo, Germán pointed down the street and asked, “Want one?” Ripe plantains, being grilled by a street vendor. Yes! I dashed (hobbled) across the main drag in Mindo and plopped myself onto a chair. As we ate, Arline was fascinated by the canine population. Almost without exception, the dogs are contented, well-fed and semi-comatose, only waking from their naps in the street to eat or grudgingly move out of the way of oncoming traffic. If I believed in reincarnation, I could do a lot worse than come back as a dog in Mindo.

After our snack, we went out to the butterfly farm. The walkway to the main building is lined with hummingbird feeders. Arline stood a little too close to a flight path and got dive-bombed by a hummingbird on a mission. I took pictures like a tourist. Then it struck me that I was a tourist and for some reason that was hilarious.

When I had children, divorced and spent years as a single mom, returning to Quito seemed to slip out of reach. Then I married the love of my life. He saw the ache in me and we started planning to visit Ecuador together. He learned to make Ecuadorian foods and listened to my stories with his heart. He died before we could ever make that trip.

Becky, Germán, Arline and I ended the evening by literally walking around the town and then stopping at a little restaurant on the main street for dinner. We all ordered churrasco. A moment later, the kitchen help ran out the door toward the center of town two blocks away. She returned in a few minutes with the eggs needed for Ecuador’s version of churrasco. That’s when we all remembered the chickens that freely roam the town square – and wondered exactly where she’d gone.

By the time supper was over, it was long dark in Mindo, and the sidewalks were nearly empty. Becky and Germán went to their room. The B&B was charming, with beautiful tile and lovely plants in the courtyard. (It was all pretty enough to distract us from the fact that the light switches in the bathroom were in – not by - the shower.) Arline and I got ready for bed and turned out the lights. I lay there, wide awake. Instead of the frogs I expected to hear singing, I could hear the happy drunks in the hotel bar. All of a sudden, Arline’s voice came from the other side of the room: “I can’t sleep. What time is it, anyway?” I pulled out my phone and looked. “Nine o’clock.” The lights came back on and we sat up to chat until the more believable bedtime of 10 o’clock.

Sometimes it seemed I would never get to return. I felt disconnected, restless. Even as we boarded in DFW, part of me expected something to go wrong. And now it was more than 24 hours since our plane swung up through the southern end of the valley, flying low over Quito; since I held my breath until we flew past an old familiar landmark and I squealed, “My old school!” Since the wheels touched down and my throat tightened and I whispered, “I’m back!”

When I did fall asleep, I slept soundly.

(to be continued...)