When Melissa and I decided to blog about our adventure, you would think that after thirty years together I would have realized that I would never be able to keep up with her.  You would think that I would have foreseen that she would complete three to four detailed, grammatically perfect, fact-checked entries to every one of my rambling, stream-of-conscious, watch me be deep and profound, typo-ridden, poetic license taken entries.

Alas, I did not.  In fact, the only reason I am sitting in the Luang Prabang airport this afternoon writing is because sitting not 17 inches away from me, oblivious to everything around her, is my wonderful wife banging out another masterpiece.  I did take notes today on my phone; I swear.  But I’m too tired and lazy to check them.  Melissa, in just seven days, has a complete version of our trip, a kind of War and Peace of notes, carefully typed into her phone.  Her phone! Do you know what that would look like if I typed those notes?  Let’s just say a monkey banging on a typewriter would produce better.

Like I said, the only reason I am still typing is because she is.  I have nothing to say of any great merit because I know that her next post will put Britannica to shame.  And here’s the real humbling part, I had to ask her how to spell Britannica.

I am what is known as the trailing spouse.  I’m okay with that.  Besides, who among you thousand followers – catch the hyperbole there (and by the way, I knew how to spell hyperbole) – want to read all this stuff anyway, except, of course Melissa’s dad, Jack, who is the kind of person (among other things) that spends hours in a museum reading every single entry on ever single exhibit.  Don’t worry. I doubt he’s reading this.

Therefore, to honor you, my dear, devoted followers (all of whom – God bless you, deserve a better life), I will cease and desist with the writing and let, as they say, a few pictures paint my thousand words.

If you have read this far, make sure to write a bunch of comments on this post.  It will drive Melissa crazy.  Just make up whatever comes to mind.  I’m after quantity here not quality.  Just don’t mention the typos or grammar errors.  Thanks.   

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Sun, Jan 20, 5 p.m, 84 F, sunny and clear: Luang Prabang airport

I’m exhausted as we wait in this modern airport (only 6 years old) for our hour-long flight (on a prop plane!) to Hanoi. Don and I had another early wake-up (5:30) so that we could sit next to the street and put sticky rice and cookies in the baskets of a line of monks (over 100) who came by bus from another village to gather alms; 2,000 monks live in the city itself. Today was a holy holiday, so the monks were newly shaved and dressed in laundered saffron robes. I’m also feeling tender. I know I need to write about our stay and our guide before we encounter the next kaleidoscope of impressions in Vietnam. I am quite sad to leave Luang Prabang. It is one of the prettiest places I have ever seen. At the same time, I am so grateful for this sweet man beside me, who handles all the complicated tipping, carries my bags when I’m tired, and keeps all our passports and important letters of entry/visa applications organized and easy to find.

Our guide first. Vong is a walking encyclopedia, with knowledge of his country’s customs, different ethnic groups (there are 49 “tribes”), and Buddhist practices. He is the first educated person I have met (I believe) who appears to be entirely without cynicism, sarcasm, or guile. He is middle-class in a poor country, yet he shows no signs of class consciousness. When he tells us about the people who live farther up the mountains, he speaks with deep respect for their animist cultural practices and self-sufficiency.* As we got to know each other better, Vong showed photos of his wife and 5-year-old daughter; his wife grew up in a small village and carries some of those traditions with her. For example, she eats squirrel, which Vong does not (there is also cooked bat, snake, and rat at the market, if you’re hungry); she also is not comfortable in restaurants, but is herself an accomplished cook. Vong’s brother works at the Tamarind (restaurant) and is just as friendly, bringing us sweet rice cakes after we told him we were stuffed and telling us funny stories about his calm older brother, “Mr. Vong.”

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Warning! Literary Allusion. In The Last Battle (the final book in the Narnia series), the Narnians are fighting the Calormen in front of a barn. Every night the Calormen bring out an ape out to scare them and convince them that Aslan is angry. In the final battle, the Narnians are thrown into the barn, together with the dwarves, who have fought both for and against them, and a young Calorman, who believes in the pagan god, Tash. Once inside, the dwarves sit in darkness. But the Narnians and the young Calorman realize they are in Narnia itself, the Calorman, too, because, although he never knew Aslan, he is noble and pure. Aslan shows up and invites those who can see Him to go farther in and higher up. Before they leave, the Narnians plead with Aslan to do something for the poor dwarves, who are sitting on what they think is dirty straw. In response, Aslan lays out a splendid feast, but again, the dwarves see nothing but rotting food and start fighting among themselves. Being in Luang Prabang has been a bit like getting a glimpse of Narnia. There is a feast here for those who welcome it, and thanks to Vong, we have moved through our days experiencing the spiritual power of his ancient, beautiful city.  

Today, we walked the standard 300 steps up a steep hill to the ancient temple, and Vong stopped us every couple of minutes to share some meaningful truth. What follows is taken from our conversation and told in his voice:

The Mother of Earth often appears alongside the Buddha and always with her hands wringing out her long hair. This is because she has two jobs – to drown the demons that threaten the Buddha and to bring water to the Buddha. In many temples, a wooden gutter in the shape of a dragon carries scented water down a slight slope to the Buddha, where it bathes him before it runs out a drain in the floor. Buddhism, according to Vong, is quite simply, Karma and the cycle of reincarnation. In Vong’s family, one couple was struggling with infertility, but then was asked by a shaman if anyone had died recently in their family. They finally became pregnant, and guess what? – the baby came out looking exactly like the 105-year-old grandfather who had died 2 years earlier.

            Typical conversation: The tail of Trump’s plane is 14 meters tall, higher than a palm tree (we all laugh).

            When we found a natural “footprint”of the Buddha  – five toes carved out of rock and painted gold – Vong said, with no hint of irony, this is “unbelievable.”

            Vong is quite upset about a recent spate of thefts by bandits who break into temples to steal the ancient bronze or gold Buddhas (probably to sell to wealthy Chinese people). But woe be to these people, because if you do something bad inside a temple, soon you will have bad luck. Following the Buddha is all about not fighting, meeting bad people with calm. The hardest thing to learn is the gift of forgiveness. Your enemy is needed to check how good you are, and your friend comes to promote you. Ordinary people pray for prosperity and health, because enlightenment is too lofty a goal; it’s too many lifetimes away (there are, after all, 7 layers of heaven). Vong told us a story of a rich businessman in Luang Prabang who had been a monk as a young man, grew his fortune and his family, and then left his children in charge of his wealth, to return to the monastery. His faithful wife meets him every morning at 6 a.m. with alms. They can laugh and talk, but they do not touch each other.

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            At the end of each of these mini-sermons, Vong lets go an infectious laugh. As we walk down the mountain, we hear the monks chanting from the Golden Temple we can see in the far distance, which is close to his home.

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Luang Prabang means “capital of the royal Buddha.” It was the original seat of the monarchy before the king moved to Vientiane (capital of Laos). It sits at the confluence of two rivers: the Mekong and Nam Khan (“winding current river”) and the heart of the city, including the charming old city, is a UNESCO world heritage site. True to its location, Luang Prabang is where Lao and French architecture meet in a unique combined style and all these tribes live together peacefully. [At the Villa Maly hotel, one of the staff is a young French woman who first came to the city as a volunteer with a French organization. When she flew back to Paris after her few weeks’ stay, she quickly realized that her heart was in Luang Prabang; she has lived here four years. She pointed out to me at breakfast that we were being served by 3 young men who say “Good morning” in 3 different languages. I believe they were Hmong, Tai, and Khmu-the original tribe here, who immigrated from India].

*The ethnic diversity here has perhaps saved Luang Prabang from conforming to a single set of Communist standards. When the State was created 43 years ago, it kept the rules of inheritance whereby a piece of land is privately owned and passed down from one generation to the next. FYI, Laos is a land-locked country slightly smaller in size than the United Kingdom. It has 7 million people, most of them farmers, compared to 68 million in Thailand and 94 million in Vietnam. Today, more Chinese and Vietnamese are moving to Luang Prabang for work. Vong says they are undercutting businesses with lower prices and taking jobs away from the Laos people (I don’t say “Laotian” because nobody here does).

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The culture here is so rich and different that Don and I soak in all we can, knowing that we leave some behind. Laos looks a lot like northern Thailand – lush and fertile, with fields of tapioca, lychee, rice, eggplant, banana and rubber trees. We joked nervously as the two-hour drive east to the Thai-Laos border took us up into the mountains. The highway we were on was the only sign of modernity; twenty years ago, it had replaced a dirt road. We’d been told the border crossing could take two hours, as it is a complicated visa process involving $35 in new bills (they would, indeed, reject several we offered, making us a little worried), a passport photo, and a tiny form we had been given by the customs official in Bangkok. Each of our guides goes by a nickname: Alice, Dang (red), Sam (three), Fuk (pumpkin), La (youngest). Their English is very good and we talk about all kinds of things, from politics to history to regional differences in food and language. Buddhism is like most other religions, in that some people are strict followers, but most are content to respect the spirit of the law. At the same time, it more visibly permeates the culture in Thailand and Laos. This morning, Don and I fell into step behind a line of 6-7 young monks walking into a rural village barefoot and dressed in saffron robes tied with a rope. They carried their bowls (for collecting food) and staffs. They ranged in age from about 6 to 11. One little guy had moved up in line, but he had to scoot to the back when an older boy gave him a shove! I really do not want to generalize, but Buddhism, it would seem, accounts for the gentleness of these people. Thirty years ago, every young man stayed at a monastery (for a few days or up to 9 months) as part of his education. That is no longer the case, but locals still line up every morning at 6 a.m. to give alms to the monks. The spiritual element is apparent in the storytelling, effortless courtesy and easy smiles of these hard-working people.

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We spent two days traveling down river (from Chiang Rai to Luang Prabang) on a long and narrow, but elegantly furnished wooden boat. The Mekong runs through five countries: China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. China has built seven huge dams on it, one in Laos, which has caused a lot of heartache. Farmers along the river are not told when the river will be flooded, so they often lose the gardens they are used to planting at the river’s edge. The watermark on our lodge indicated that the river had risen about 30 feet the last flooding. Yesterday we stopped at a village of lowlanders. On the ground beneath one wooden house on stilts sat a chunk of iron fitted between wooden blocks and used to sharpen tools and knives. It was part of a bomb. Ordinance can be found everywhere in Laos, especially close to the Vietnam border. In the War, the United States (in the “Secret War”) dropped 3 million tons of bombs on this tiny country, and 2 million tons still remain. Every year, 50-60 people are killed by bombs that detonate when they try to move them. In the markets, they sell jewelry and other objects made of parts of bombs. Our guide saw President Obama when he came to one of these villages as a private citizen, in 2016. Obama impressed the Lao people with his humble manner. When he tried to buy a coconut, the vendor wouldn’t take his money and finally Obama just put down $10. Through a translator, Obama asked the crowd that gathered to tell him honestly how they felt about Americans. No one would say anything, until finally one man raised his hand and said politely, “It makes us pretty grumpy.” That emboldened a couple more to contribute: “We hate Americans, I want to kill Americans.” Obama thanked them for their honest answers. When he got home, he raised $19 million to send back for de-mining.

Our guide was hesitant to share this story and any story that we might construe as “negative” (because he didn’t want us to feel “bad”). Yet he did say that many of the girls living in the village would go into the sex trade, because they couldn’t afford secondary school. We also learned that while the villagers appreciated the electricity and primary school the government provided, they used the condoms for anything but contraception, including as covers for Iphones. Boarding the boat to leave, we were met with a tray of rolled-up towels soaked in ice water and a glass of cool water. Don said it reminded him of the Bible verse “be kind to your enemies, because you will be heaping hot coals on their heads.” Yes.

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Staring out at the forest on both sides of the Mekong, I realized that these images were familiar to me, because they came from countless supposedly anti-war movies. Yet while they haunt the American conscience (including my own), they don’t produce any new revelations about the people who live here. The reason Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was so perfectly adapted to the Vietnam War is that we’ve only ever looked into a mirror here in Southeast Asia, finding only our own ugliness reflected back to us. American GIs knew this, which is why they, too, were a Lost Generation, returning home from a drawn-out conflict (1964-73) that they had little to no stake in, only (for some) the innocent belief that the American leaders that put them there knew what they were doing. Vietnam (and Cambodia, Laos) was not theirs to protect or defend; there was no gold to enrich themselves with, no larger purpose worth fulfilling, just a bunch of fishers and farmers eking out the barest existences and already exploited by the French and Chinese. There’s that scene in “Apocalypse Now” of the boat going up the river, with Pvt. Lance is holding foil trays up to face to tan; he will later be ordered by Col. Kilgore to surf the waves in the Mekong Delta. I now have my own sense of what the bored but tense GIs felt. There’s no there there in the jungle. You can look and look, but the canopy of trees is impenetrable. Hidden dangers lurk, filling you with fear and unease, but all you hear is the loudness of your thoughts. Even now, years later, we are well-meaning tourists like Mrs. Moore in the caves in A Passage to India, well-meaning but completely out of our depth.

Jan. 19: Luang Prabang. I am absolutely charmed by this vibrant, colorful town of 60, 000 along the Mekong River. It really is Shangri-La, with French Colonial hotels facing the river and pastoral scenes of bamboo bridges, fisherman’s boats, and mist-covered mountains. I have never seen so many shades of green. Any claim we as Americans have to our superior lifestyle shrivels and dies in a place like this. For one thing, the food here is some of the best I have ever eaten: fresher, more delicately seasoned than anything I eat at home. For another, the people are soft-spoken, kind, and gentle.

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Today, our guide took us to an incredible set of waterfalls carved out of limestone, which turns the water a beautiful turquoise. Our picnic lunch was a veritable United Nations feast, from the dried fish and chilis our guides Vong and Pan brought, to the varieties of milk products from the water buffalo farm: feta, yogurt, babaghanoush, blue cheese, buffalo mozzarella, together with French ham, mushroom, and pickle baguettes and the freshest salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, croutons, watercress and lettuce.

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The Buffalo farm deserves its own paragraph. It is the brainchild – and ambitious social enterprise – of an Australian couple who realized on a visit to Sri Lanka that water buffalo could be used for milk (not just plowing fields and meat). Water buffalo udders are shorter than cows’, so milking is a lot harder. Once you decide to put in the effort, you get 2-3 liters of buffalo milk a day, compared to 40-80 liters for a milk cow. To improve this, they are crossbreeding Swamp buffalo with Mira buffalo, which produce 10-15 liters a day. All this work is happening in a culture that has no milk or dairy products! According to our guide, most Laos wouldn’t touch our picnic because they thought we were eating animal fat. They think that yogurt comes from fruit; they also don’t realize that you need a calf for yogurt, because that’s the only time a cow lactates. God love this couple, though. They’re trying out all kinds of products in their kitchen; apparently, the first camembert had to be used as fondue. I was sorry we didn’t get to meet them, because they are doing something no one else thought of doing. I also wanted to thank them for the feast they gave us for lunch. Dwight, our farm guide, is from Calgary and volunteering for 2-3 weeks through an organization called Work Away. In addition to being a good source of nutrition, with 8-9% more fat and tons of vitamins and minerals, the farmers who rent their buffalo to the farm get free vaccinations for the cows and training in better agricultural practices.

If you come to Luang Prabang, you will see small birds in bamboo cages for sale (they are caught on farms where they are pests and sold to tourists to release), eat yummy sticky rice stuffed into bamboo sticks and sealed with banana leaves, and wonder at the forests of teak, rosewood, and mahogany. You will walk clean streets, spend big (last night our dinner cost us 313,500 Kips, or about $30), and have your choice of apple pie, basil, or tamarind buffalo ice cream. For dinner, you will eat “larb,” a dish of minced beef and rice with spices, or perhaps, perch from the river steamed in a banana leaf with greens and basil, lemongrass and rice powder. You will rise at 6 a.m. to hand out sticky rice and cookies to monks – under trees, that are also wrapped in saffron sashes, because they are believed to be monks who stand tall and serene on city streets – absorb symphonic birdsong and touch the most exquisite silk cloths. These fabrics are dyed using a variety of natural plants like lemongrass, teak, and the sappa tree. To deepen the color, natural dyes are mixed with rusty nails and turned into intricate, brilliant patterns.

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You will stand quietly and admire the slight Hmong porters who climb the stairs from the river carrying several pieces of luggage or carry heavy loads of sticks on their backs from the mountains to the markets. You will smile every time you see a laughing Lao child. You will be mesmerized by the graceful dancing hands that morph into birds or the morning glory or gardenia. No wonder ancient explorers traveled great distances to amass the treasures of “the Orient.” Don and I walked at sunrise through the awakening town, picked up our stinky clothes – now smelling sweetly of lemongrass – at a local laundry, and ate mandarins that redefine “orange” for us. Now close your eyes and imagine the town at night. There’s a full moon peeking out from scudding clouds and lighting up the bowl of the sky. Elegant hotels beckon with trees full of white lanterns and lighted globes. The pleasures could not be deeper, nor more simple.

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In Chiang Mai (“city new”), we visited Doi Suthep. All these temples come with stories that our guides recount to us eagerly and in great detail, despite the fact that they retell them every day. In this one, monks loaded an elephant at the bottom of this mountain with a sacred relic (part of Buddha’s brain) and followed it as it meandered its way up. It stopped twice before reaching the top. Temples were erected at each site, the highest one consisting of several structures, including a burial site under a banyan tree that supposedly grew from a cutting of the tree the Buddha sat under. We ascended to Doi Suthep up a staircase of 300 steps, bordered by a banister of a long serpent’s body, tail at the top. When the Buddha decided to leave his life of wealth and leisure, serpents protected him against the demons who assailed him. A brief word about death: Each village has a crematorium, and traditionalists still burn bodies in open concrete pits. Our guide scooped up whitened bits of bone to show us.

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We spent the evening with a middle-class family who helped us cook our own Thai meal with the herbs and oils from their farm. This was a great experience, as it allowed us to relax and laugh with our hosts, who so graciously introduced their entire family, from their 2-year old to their 91-year-old grandmother. Everyone (but the toddler) was working, with the grandmother rolling banana leaf cigars at the fire (pounding and drying the leaves, then rolling them with tobacco). Our proud host showed us the upstairs of his house, with one bedroom kept empty as a sacred space for past family members, all of whom we had “met” in the entry hall photos. He sat us on the floor and gave us tea leaves to chew with a little salt (in the old style) and a betel nut (both were bitter). We were there with a lively French couple from Nice. While her husband spoke a little English, she didn’t, and my being able to translate words and phrases for them made the evening even more fun. That, and the fact that every piece of food we put into our mouths was so fresh and succulent.

I have visited many rural villages in developing countries over the last decade, mostly in Central America.  I have either become callous or clinically detached from the poverty, the dirt floors, the dark, low ceilings and stick walls, the lung-clutching smoke from the cooking fire that never stops smoldering.  I no longer see the tiny brown children smiling and think how happy they are with so little.  To be honest, I was not sure what I felt or how I was supposed to feel until yesterday when we visited a rural village on the Mekong River in Laos.  

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We booked a tour with a local company on a power boat, at least sixty feet in length with cushioned seats, wooden tables, a bar, a separate seating area and even a small futon for napping.  Imagine business class on a 747 and you will get a pretty good idea of our comfort. The boat is staffed with half a dozen people along with the captain and his assistant.  Moments after boarding, one of the men mops the varnished wooden floor. The entire boat, including the toilets, is spotless.  We ride low in the swirling, caramel colored river, open-air, mesmerized by the landscape drifting past as if it, and not the river were flowing, an endless stream of rocky banks laced with muddy sand bars cut into the mountainous jungle rising steeply out of the river.

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After four or five hours, we disembark on a sand flat and climb the steep bank to the village. I’ve seen this before.  A dozen or so white skinned people walking through the hard-packed mud streets, smiles plastered to our faces desperate to disassociate ourselves from our unearned privilege.  There is the nervous older lady, smiling too hard for her face, constantly bowing in a western imitation of the local greeting, loudly asking questions as if showing interest in their poverty will somehow absolve her of guilt. The distance between tourist and villager is wider even than the Mekong swollen to its full raging height during the wet season, and equally impassable.  Our questions and smiles decompose in the air between us like sticks thrown in the river.  It is not a matter of language, or customs.  It is not even a matter of privilege and random injustice.   

Unconsciously, I separate myself from the group telling myself the same arrogant lies.  I am not part of this group.  I am different because I have seen this before.  I worked in these villages, not here, but in the ones in Central America.  I tried to do something to help.  I am not – and here is the biggest lie of all – a poverty tourist.  

As we head back down the bank to the boat, I ask our guide, La, what the people in these villages think of Americans.  La tells me the story of when President Obama visited Laos, of when he asked the villagers, through an interpreter, the same question.  La tells me the villagers would not answer.  They were anxious about the question.  He tells me that after prompting from the President, pleading by the President for them to be honest, a villager said, in what must be considered the most diplomatic understatement in history, “we are still grumpy.”

The older woman behind me is loudly talking to her companions as she cautiously descends the steep slope saying things I have heard before, things that now make me wince or cringe or both.  “They were so friendly.  What a lovely village.  Isn’t it amazing?  We really are not so different.”

She could not be more wrong. We are an annoyance, a condition in the contract between the village and the government.  They suffer our desperate need for absolution so that the government will supply the village with electricity and fresh water.  They are still grumpy, though you would never know it. 

As I step back onto our boat unsettled by how my muddy sandals make tracks on the polished floor, a crew member hands me a cold, damp, white cloth.  He is simply doing his job. There is no animosity in him, no condemnation or contempt; and, yet, the damp cool towel feels like a slap in the face, a hard, cold slap.  

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos then have ever been dropped on any other country in the world including Germany during World War II.  More than fifty years later, those same bombs, some unexploded and hidden in villages like the one I just visited, kill over fifty Lao a year.  The concussive evil of our insanity continues to reverberate today.  

When President Obama returned to the United States after his visit to Laos, he announced that the United States would give $19 million dollars to Laos to assist in the effort to disarm unexploded ordinances.  Before Donald Trump took office, about $16 million of the promised amount had been funded. When La told me this, he sounded grateful for the financial assistance, but that was not the part of his story that stuck with me.  La said that President Obama asked a village woman for a coconut.  She skinned it, cut it open and handed it to the President. He insisted on paying for it from his own pocket.  All of this touched La.  Yet, he was moved most because President Obama drank the milk of the coconut.  As La said, he accepted what had been offered. 

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I do not feel guilty for being born a white American.  I do not feel gifted or special either.  I had no more control over the timing or place of my birth than any person in that Mekong village did.  I do feel responsible for the insanity and cruelty of our country, not just in Laos, but in Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Iraq. Like slavery and racism, like the genocide of Native Americans, our evils continue to haunt and harm.  They are, as has been said so eloquently, a stain upon our consciousness.  The United States is a unique and wonderful country.  It is also deeply flawed like all countries, like all humanity.  Our history is not so different from the history of other great powers.  We have been responsible for both unprecedented good and unspeakable evil. The question is not, are we an exceptional country.  The question is, as it has always been, are we capable of acknowledging our faults and accepting what is offered.

I put the cool towel on the tray held by the crewman and thanked him.  Sometimes a slap in the face is precisely what I need.

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It took us 24 disorienting hours of travel to fly from Seattle, through Seoul, to Bangkok. South Korean airlines was so much nicer than Delta that we felt revived for the last leg (6 hours). We ascended a staircase to the upper deck of what felt like a cruise ship, with tons of space and everything a soothing aquamarine. The all-female crew (including a “purser”) introduced themselves bowing, all in a retro-feminine uniform of aquamarine blouse, starched scarf, and cream skirt, hair coiffed in a bun, flawless skin and beautiful faces. The first photo was taken in the Bangkok airport, a colossal structure with terminals that extend for miles. The second photo is where we find ourselves now, Hotel Riva Surya, on a river on a sunny but smoggy morning.

Finding an original blog title takes effort. My “Fall to Pieces!” prompted Don to recall his grandfather yelling, “Save the Pieces!” whenever he heard a crash in the house (much better). But Patsy Cline knew a thing or two. The self that can be de-composed by love – falling, yes, but upward, into the ether of non-self – is to be longed for. As Don and I have dreamed, planned and prepared for every step of this Sabbatical together, we have “fallen” in love again and again. Today, though, I’m aware of the pieces that will fall away for me during these next six months, the rituals and routines that hem me in and keep me whole. Sundays begin with two cups of coffee and The New York Times, followed by a drive across town to masters swimming and 90 minutes of intense intervals with my buddies. I love pushing myself to the limit, but how tame and prescribed my “limits” have become! Things around me are changing all the time, with Meg, Josh, and Nick growing up and out, and parents meeting new obstacles with grit and courage. Routines aren’t bad – mine provide a stream of happiness in a life that too often feels stressful. But we’re about to throw the pieces in the air and let them rain down like confetti! We’ll save the beautiful ones – our incredible friends-like-family – but create a new mosaic. I got my home on my back (okay, + one carry-on) and no need to keep food in the fridge for the kids or grade papers. Hallelujah!

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