Malu

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.