the dirty laundry show

I lay in bed last night listening to the ambient sounds of little dogs yapping and semi truck brakes squealing as my gut worked to digest my 500th dinner of rice and beans. This must be what pythons feel like after they gulp down an unsuspecting forest animal. Thank God for Pepto. I’m proud to say we’ve accomplished everything we set out to do here – saw some ruins, swam in cenotes, did some yoga, ate some authentic tacos.

Despite all of the road signs alerting us to their presence, I never did spy a jaguar, but maybe that’s for the best. The creatures we did see included a six-foot crocodile submerging itself in the shallow water beneath the decrepit bridge on which we stood, with no rails to hold us back from an accidental death plunge. And sidestepping an active pee stream from a pack of howler monkeys overhead ranks fairly high on my favorite things list. So much danger and defecation becomes possible when there isn’t a thick plate of zoo glass separating you from the wild.

With five more days until our departure, it still feels like time is flying, but our internal rhythms have calmed to their first-day levels. Upon arrival, there was still plenty of time for everything and no reason to rush. Halfway through, we began to experience an urgency to get out and accomplish our scenic to-do’s. Now, having crossed so much off our list, we’re again able to relax and revisit some of our family favorites: the white sandy beaches of Sian Ka’an, the Mediterranean vibe of nearby Akumal, and of course Aldo’s ice cream shack for vegan mango and hazelnut double scoops.

The thought of returning home no longer throws me into a panic. It’s the little things I miss: flushing my toilet paper down the actual toilet, brushing my teeth with water from the sink. I haven’t decided yet whether I’d trade the giant cockroaches in my kitchen for Montana’s hobo spiders… but I’m really ready to trade beans and rice for green salad with quinoa. My gut is gonna need a full year detox to shed its starchy layers.

I’m also beginning to mentally sort through what we’ll bring home with us and what we’ll leave behind – physically and emotionally/mentally. Nick says, in the tradition of the Buddha, that we’re not the same people we were when we came here. The same can be said for every trip we’ve ever taken. Every day of life we live. The Apostle Paul calls it being reformed into new creations. I thought about this as we ran our hands over the thousand-year-old stones of the Mayan purification tunnels. The original deep reds and blues of the walls had long since faded, worn by time and the elements. But even through dozens of divets and soft layers of algae, their original power could somehow be felt – all the energy and connection of a once-thriving community stored in its molecules.

What would they think of us, I wondered, these five-foot-tall people with purposely lengthened foreheads and gemstones encrusted in their teeth, who walked everywhere for lack of horses and cherished cocoa beans as currency? They might watch my already five-foot-tall pre-teen son riding around on some two-wheeled contraption in his basketball shorts, watch us trade colorful pieces of paper for a 90-minute tour of their ancestral home, and wonder about us in return. They couldn’t have possibly known there might one day exist a giant magic metal bird that would ferry strangers from unknown parts of the globe to their backyard, where street sellers would line up to exchange blankets, leather trinkets, and colorful sombreros as mementos of their proud history.

They couldn’t have known that more than 900 years after their mysterious disappearance from the area, a family of four from someplace called the United States would sit at the entrance and bicker over cold coconuts. Or ride bikes beneath the forest canopy, the little girl playfully inquiring whether her ancestors were part of the upper or lower class – the mother wondering to herself at the incredible twists and turns of time: that a bloodline of Aztecs, Mexicans, and Irish could join a bloodline of English pilgrims, Germans, and French to create two new humans in whom centuries of cultural strife unites in harmony.