Last Monday we loaded up the little car we rent when we are here in
Nairobi with a couple bags, a scrabble board and a sack of snacks and headed
out of town. Annabelle slept for the first hour or so of the trip and woke up
right as we crested the Great Rift Valley. The precarious road hemmed only with
vegetable vendors and herds of fat sheep wove drunkenly along the edge of the
rift, while Mt. Longonot soared out of the patchwork valley far below us. I
knew when Annabelle woke up because I heard her mumble groggily from the
backseat, “Oh my ness…” as she gazed out the window.
The dirt road to Malu Lodge wound steeply up an escarpment outside of
Naivasha town through brushy forest and over a couple streams. By the time we
arrived our car was splattered with mud after a couple close calls. We stepped
out into a meadow tired and hungry and at the beginning of what turned out to
be an absolutely lovely first-ever getaway as a family of three.
We stayed in a two bed-room cabin with a stone fireplace and wide front
porch overlooking the lake far below. The four-poster beds were made up with
white-down comforters and the walls were hung with water-color paintings of Joy
Anderson’s lions and old black and white photos of Karen Blixen. The water to
the deep bathtubs ran from a tank over a wood-burning fire nearby. It’s just
the kind of place that makes you realize with a thrill of delighted shame just
exactly why former colonists were just so reluctant to leave.
We spent the next four days sunk deep into wicker chairs in front of a
crackling fire (Naivasha is chilly) reading and drinking from steaming mugs.
Annabelle scared off the skittish dik-diks who would tiptoe up to our front
porch or, when we walked down the path labeled “To the Farm Animals”, would pet
the rabbits and chase the chickens and guineas and dubiously let the calves
suck her fingers. She even rode a saddled donkey named John on the trails
around the lodge, scattering a family of indignant warthogs across the field in
front of her. For lunch and breakfast we walked about ten minutes down a muddy
trail to the clubhouse where we ate four course meals that always included
bread and butter, both homemade. Supper was brought to our cabin on a huge tray
and we ate in front of the fire in our pajamas. After Annabelle went to bed
Bryan and I stayed up far later than we intended to, not as often playing
scrabble or reading as much as just talking. Not about the future or even the
recent past but about childhood memories we had never shared for one reason or
another, or that professor in college that forever changed the way we see the
world or why we didn’t fall in love with the people we knew before each other.
And why meeting each other was different.
On one day we took a picnic lunch to Hell’s Gate National Park (which
is far more inviting than it sounds) and took Annabelle on her first game
drive. There are no big cats in the park making it open to mountain bikers and
we had fun reminiscing about the day we biked across the park through herds of
zebra in a weekend celebrating the discovery that Annabelle was just a few
weeks old inside of me. We remembered that weekend as we drove instead of biked
this time, our firstborn nestled up sound asleep in my arms on top of her pushy
little sister.
On the day we left, we drove down the escarpment and took a boat ride,
Annabelle’s first, across the lake. We slid across the salty green water,
disturbing swarms of pelicans and pink clouds of flamingos. Along the banks we
nosed up to great pods of hippos sunning like mounds of wrinkled wet rocks. The
biggest ones would sink beneath the surface in a snort of bubbles as we floated
by only to resurface closer to the boat minutes later. Annabelle was annoyed by
my death grip and kept “moo-ing” at the hippos to get their attention.
The final hours of our holiday were tearful for me, and it’s hard to
say exactly why. My emotions have lingered through the weekend and though I
suspect they are the kind best sorted out by a long lonely run, I am long past
fast movement of any sort and am left sifting through my heart with an idle
body. Nostalgia is the word that comes closest to describing what I feel,
though it alone cannot carry enough nuance to hold my strange self these days.
But something like nostalgia is what I felt as we drove back across the Rift
Valley and home (“home”, home? home…) again.
Nostalgia for many things. Nostalgia for pieces of my own childhood.
Nostalgia for the stomach-dropping romance of falling in love for the first
time. Nostalgia for the sweet intimacy of marriage without babies and nostalgia
for these precious priceless days of becoming parents of our first baby and
being just three. And then even in some strange way, nostalgia for what hasn’t
even come yet much less passed us by. Nostalgia for being parents of two little
girls (maybe more?), for the nights we will sit around fires and play board
games and stay up late talking about what they will be when they grow up or retelling the story once again of how mama and papa met. In some strange time warp of the heart I find
myself cherishing and grieving all the sweetness of life, both that which has
come and gone and that which is still ahead.
Something about last week was briefly perfect and as such it was unable
to hold itself all in. And I think some of its sweetness must have sloshed out
of place, splashing time both ahead and behind it. And the overflow of goodness
and the sweet stains it leaves long after it has passed has left my heart thoughtful today.
