Returning.

I traveled to the beaches of the Yucatan with one of my closest college friends, at the tender age of 19. I returned again and again, learning to scuba dive in my early 20s, wandering various places with my sister in that same decade, eventually returning early in my marriage with my now ex-husband, and again with him and with our young children at least three times through the years of our 30s and 40s.

Each time, in those years, my journey was to a place of adventure and discovery, to a place to stretch limits and share a sense of exploration and wonder.

I returned again to the Yucatan this third pandemic-year for the first year in more than ten, decision made exactly one-year ago after 9 months of being limited to my largely house-bound life.

Much had changed in my world; in the between-times between my last trip in 2010 and now, journeys for children, for college visits, to student children abroad and later living scattered across the United States seemingly substituted for those to the Yucatan - San Diego, Nashville, Berlin, Madrid, Chicago, Waterville, Washington, Copenhagen, Rennes, Beijing, Paris, London, Aachen, Rome.

Not ‘Oh, the places you’ll go !’ ‘Oh, the places we WENT.’

My children’s own wanderlust also took them to places on their own - to Russia, Australia, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Bosnia, Turkey, Hungary, and other places I can’t identify on a map. Yes, those roaming genes run strong in this gene pool and those children are certainly mine. Insert wink emoji here.

And, yes, all that and heaven too - in this last decade plus one. What a measure of a life well lived.

Much else has inexplicably altered since 2010. I haven’t been scuba diving in almost as many years as I have been away from Mexico, and doubt I will soon, save my youngest’s desire to learn and mine to observe her process. My ex-husband departed the life we struggled for and made and lived together, seeking happiness or perhaps its illusion elsewhere; he never did share a near-to compulsion to travel equal to my own. And, this bloody pandemic has dragged on through various incarnations, waylaying many a travel dream.

With age, and in my 50s, I am more content to sit in my beach chair and gaze at stars than ever, settled with the recognition that some aspects of age are worth embracing.

I know now though that I yearn for familiarity and for family in my travels. I am very much aware of the passage of time, and of the gift of the presence of those I love in the places that I return to over the course of my lifetime.

Legacy; a place where my history lives in the reasons for my wanderings.

I hope that my family - my sister, and brother-in-law and nephew, and my grown children and the families they may create - see the same.

And, I hope they return again and again to the beaches of the familiar along the Yucatan coast.