Another Day in the Country
Out-of-town tourist
© Another Day in the Country
Winter came while I’ve been gone. Red dogwood bushes have lost their leaves. Four-o’clocks have given up the ghost. Grass in my front yard — the only portion I pamper — is brown.
I have just spent a week in Mexico in case you are wondering. There, everything is green, green, and more green.
I was at a man-made tropical paradise on the ocean with everything any person from Idaho (where they’ve already had snow) or Kansas would want to go during the winter months.
My friends are from Idaho. They had called and said, “Pat, do you want to go to Cancun with us?”
As the date approached, they said I wasn’t going to appreciate the tropics because Kansas still had warm weather and sunshine.
“Why would you want to leave?” they wondered.
“I’m just coming to spend time with you,” I told them. “It’s not for sightseeing.”
These people, after all, have been my friends for more than 60 years. Who is lucky enough to have friends like that at my age?
Come to think of it, longstanding friendships are why so many of you love spending another day in the country.
I’m sure that having lived all of your life around here, you have friends from your days in grade school. How lucky is that?
My friend Norma was 19 and just married to Gary, 21, when I met them. I was 23 and married for three years. My husband had just finished seminary training, and we were assigned to intern with a seasoned pastor in Denver who just happened to be Gary’s uncle.
Our new boss said, “My nephew just got married, and his wife is new in the church, and I’d like for you to meet them.”
We became friends and have been lucky enough to spend most of a lifetime together as friends, living in dozens of places — even foreign countries — but living in the same towns for only half a dozen of those years.
Through the years, we’ve traveled together, sometimes for work but most often on vacation, so this was not an unusual invitation.
They’ve visited Ramona, Kansas, several times, and even gone to River Festival in Salina with us. We took them to the Flint Hills one year for the annual concert. They still talk about the wonder of that experience.
More so than me, they always are on the go — especially once Gary retired from teaching at age 80.
Like lots of retirees, he retired from one job and took up another. In this last job, he taught a bunch of teenagers in a college prep school.
I understand his love of the job because I know how much I love teaching my elementary kids art — only I do it once a week, and he did it full time.
So we launched our vacation — them on Delta and me leaving Wichita on Southwest, with plans to meet up at an airport.
Anyone who travels a lot will say, “Oh, dear, that is their first mistake.”
“Don’t deviate from the plan,” they said to me, and I promised I wouldn’t.
I was very tempted to deviate when after five hours I still hadn’t found them. Thanks to our trusty cell phones, however, we eventually were able to find one another and get a taxi to the resort.
How did we travel without cell phones for all those years? We were fine, weren’t we? Now, if I lost my cell phone, I would think it was a huge catastrophe.
This time of year in Mexico it is in the 80s. Who doesn’t love 80-degree weather in November without wind? Who would ever say “no” to a chance like this?
The very idea of a resort is based on going somewhere unusual and beautifully manicured, with vegetation you didn’t plant and never have to take care of, golf course grass that you never have to mow or fertilize, in a tropical jungle planned by a landscape designer with just the right density of foliage so that you are oblivious to all the work it takes to keep it looking like this and blissfully unaware of how close by hundreds, even thousands, of people are, because you can’t see them.
We did see people at all the gorgeous aqua-colored pools, in the shops, and at the restaurants, but it was fewer than we expected for this time of year.
I felt right at home as the taxi driver took us to the resort because, right in the middle of a town, I saw a giant windmill — like on the edge of Ramona — generating electricity. It looked to me as if they needed lots more.
A week went by quickly. The staff was wonderfully friendly and helpful.
When staffers would greet us, they’d put their hands over their hearts and say “Hola,” making eye contact, dipping their head in recognition and smiling.
I told myself to remember to bring that idea home.
As I waited to board my flight, I looked around the waiting area and noticed that every single person had his or her phone out doing something. Everyone!
Their eyes were down, and they were absorbed in that screen. Once in a while, someone would nudge a person and show something, but for them life was happening on that phone. They didn’t even see me watching. And, truth be told, while I watched them, I was listening to a book on Audible.
I left my friends there to enjoy the resort for another week, and I headed back to my little scrap of ground in Ramona, tired in one way but refreshed in another.
It’s good to be home and able to spend another day in the country.
corrections
and clarifications
Peabody Police Chief Phillip Crom’s name was misspelled in some editions last week.