I Dream of Costa Rica

I am a boring person. Supermarket boring, make that market, nothing spectacularly super about it. I like watching tv, shopping, hanging out with friends. I feel a little trill of excitement when I get those free return address labels from the Susan G. Koman foundation, or Save the Pandas, whatever. I rip open the envelope to see--do they have pink ribbons on them? Flowers? A Smile Train smile? Oh goody! They spelled my name correctly! In some ways this is sad, I know. But I feel very safe with the mundane.

Bryan wants us to move to Costa Rica. This is not new. He is a tropical boy who breathes best underwater. When he was ten years old his parents took him out of school for a year and they sailed to Tahiti. When I was ten years old I read every book on Ramona Quimby. This is the biggest difference between us: He craves movement and I need to be still.

Last night I could not sleep; I thought of Kuki Gallmann. Kim Basinger. Alec Baldwin was a fleeting thought based on pure free-association. Filthy pigs. There are fer de lance snakes in Costa Rica, spiders the size of dinner plates, torrential rain and cars that pass on blind curves. I am fairly certain Susan G. Koman would not send me address labels. For one, I would not have an address.

But what would we do? I ask Bryan. Nothing, he says, as if nothing is a perfectly acceptable answer, a perfectly acceptable thing to do, which I suppose it is somewhere, for some reason, or no reason at all. We would live on the money we make off our house and then come home when it ran out, he said. At some point he fell asleep and I listened to the click of my eyelids in the dark as I tried to troubleshoot what I saw as trouble: So we would come home with nothing? What about our stuff? Our cars? How we would get around? How would we do our laundry? What about Nacho? What about health insurance? What about Zoey? She loves her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, sees them all the time now. What about pre-school? And I did what I do when I feel uncertain: I tried to see it for certain. Zoey muddy and laughing at the beach (But she hates the feel of sand!). Me writing a book about the adventure (But would I be able to find wireless access? Could the laptop withstand the humidity, the salt air? The rain?) We would come home and live with Bryan's parents. (With nothing!) Beside me, Bryan snored. In the dark of the night I lived a year in Costa Rica, the glamour of the idea, the jealous shine in the eyes of my friends when I told them, the book deal, the gnawing homesickness, the boredom of nothing, the fear of freedom. The viper that might bite my child.

In the morning I proposed an alternative idea: we stay the course, stay here, sell our house and rent. But take the money from the house and use it to buy property in Costa Rica to build a vacation home. With the goal being that eventually we spend our summers there. I can do that--Zoey would learn Spanish, all of us exotic come September. There are still questions: what would we do with our place here each summer? Will our jobs afford enough time off to make it worthwhile? But I can live with these questions. I can do three months without return address labels. Just as long as I have something still to return.

*All pics past trips to Costa Rica: Malpais and Pavones.