Ever the optimist, I thought: Great! I could live another hundred years!

I’ll never feel unmoored, not even when the wild summer storms make me sway like a hula skirt! Sure, I may lose a few branches—will it hurt when they snap off?—but probably my roots will hold.

I’ll never have to cook or wash dishes, all my meals delivered on rays of sunglow and from earthy, fermented molecules of goodness entering my body through the fine hairs on my long subterranean tendrils.

Ahh, to stand proudly day after day, shading the ambulatory beings in me and beneath me, all scrabbling for sustenance while I drink in the sun.

I wonder if I’ll get bored? Only time will tell. For now, I occupy myself with what goes on around me. With the sensations of bird fingers wrapping around my many arms, sometimes for only a moment, often overnight.

I listen to the squirrels packing twigs and leaves into a high crook, making a place to fornicate and raise babies. Then, thinking about my babies, I wonder how it will feel when my little acorns begin to grow.

A breeze tickles me from head to toe. I see the sun dip below the horizon. Night critters begin to sing. This is going to be my best life ever!

You’ve heard that everyone is born with a certain number of heartbeats—or is it exhales?—and after you’ve pumped all that air and blood, you are done.

How many miles to the finish line, you wonder. If you knew you had another twenty-five thousand miles to go, you could choose exactly when to arrive.

How many blueberry pancakes will you flip before you rest the spatula on the side plate for the last time? How many more times must you get on your hands and knees with a microfiber mop to coax the dust from underneath your bed?

You wonder, also, how many more times someone will make you laugh, gasping so hard that your cheek muscles cramp, or how many more times your heart will push wildly against your sternum at the sight of a horse with perfect conformation or a breathtaking cloud.

You search this morning’s colorless sky for clouds and find instead Orion’s belt fading like the smile on Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. But you are fairly sure clouds will eventually reappear as you pull on soft socks and slide your feet into a pair of worn sneakers.

You are certain you will see, hear, smell, touch, or think something wonderful today, or tomorrow, or the next day, and that’s when you realize that you probably will never run out of words and marvels, and that it doesn’t matter how many miles, heartbeats, or breaths it takes before you reach the end.

No point going to the Dominican Republic without getting into the water for a snorkel. We recently spent five nights at Playa de Arena Blanca beach in Punta Cana, on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, with longtime friend Henry and his family.

When they signed up for a boat tour, we said, “Count us in!”

We queued up on the beach with some of the crew while the captain brought the double-hulled catamaran closer to shore and sent a water taxi to ferry us to the boat.

A staged photo. Thanks, Dimitri!

The captain wore a black tee shirt with the words, “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” a motto that will inspire me for the rest of my life.

The place our captain chose for a swim did not have as much sargassum as the water closer to shore, but it wasn’t seaweed-free. Seaweed, smeeweed, we said, and jumped in.

I don’t have any photos of us in goggles and a spout, which is just as well because the way those things push our lips around, nobody needs to see that. Really.

Punta Cana, at a tropical 18.58 degrees north of the equator, had the kind of swimming we loved so much in Belize and Nicaragua, and on Guam and Hawaii. Eye-popping blue and bathtub-warm.

At one point, over the pounding music and the roar of the engines, I got an earful from Dimitri about discrimination towards Haitians by Dominicans. For a few moments, I thought he was talking about Asians, because that is how he pronounced Haitians. “They think ‘Asians” this,” and “They think ‘Asians” that. Eventually, I realized he was talking about his experience, about coming to this side of the island seeking work and being underestimated and underpaid.

A California girl, through and through, Kelly loves sunshine and swimming.

PARASAILING: SOMETHING WE DID NOT SAY, “YES” TO

Bob and I said, “No thanks,” to parasailing. You can throw that into a bucket with bungee jumping, ziplining, and skydiving.

But it was fun to watch our very brave friends get dragged through the air. Have to admit.

Later, Henry described the main tether, how it appeared to be anchored in plexiglass on the tow boat, and I saw Kelly squeeze her eyes shut.

There’s a metaphor here I can’t quite nail down: The family that hangs together, stays together? One for all, all for one? Hang in there? Hanging by a thread?

Triumph!

Not sure what Henry was saying after their flight. Could have been something like, “You can mark that off our bucket list!”

It didn’t take a boat and a parachute to delight this man. Henry’s excitement was chronic. During our week together, I saw his face light up when he said, “There’s coffee in the kitchen,” or after hauling off the kitchen trash, or while guiding me to the Pharmacia to get my weepy eye back on track.

Henry’s enthusiasm signalled victory for all, every win a shared triumph.

During our stay in the Dominican Republic, we breakfasted together at the Villa Blanca Beach Club every morning. I was especially fond of their Chilaquiles.

After Kelly and I shared an early morning beach walk, she’d cool off with a swim, then join the rest of us for breakfast at the club.

There was usually a cat or two hanging around.

On more than one evening, we found ourselves at Enjoy Corales restaurant down the street.

Everything they served was delicious: pizza, pasta, Dominican dishes, seafood and salad.

Henry’s twin sister, Daisy, also attended The American School in Switzerland, so Bob has known them since he was fifteen.

Bob enjoyed a nice sole fillet with fries.

Ignoring the lettuce scare back home in the States, I often asked for salad. The raw vegetables always had that crisp, freshly-harvested texture, and I never got a hint of a bellyache.

Maya has a no-nonsense personality with a splash of spontaneity and a hint of wry humor.

It took a minute to choose a dish from the extensive menu unless you didn’t eat meat or fish. That made it easy for me—salad!—and then I’d turn into one of those people who yak at you while you’re trying to decide what to have.

What I love about the third world: signs that make no sense.

Me and Bob, Maya, Henry and Kelly, Nancy and Juan, and Daisy at (let me guess) table 31.

As a splurge one evening, we dined in style at the highly-rated Citrus.

A great smile starts inside, spreading to eyes and lips. Great smiles can be passed down from mother to daughter. From what I heard about Kelly’s mother, she is also golden inside and out. So that’s three generations of beautiful smiles, possibly more.

Turns out, the Villa Blanca Beach Club offered so much more than that: sprawling thatched palapas with cushioned seating situated between a great restaurant and the beach, with waitstaff offering cold drinks and warm food.

Villa Blanca reminded me of my high school art teacher’s beach club in Long Branch, New Jersey. Idle hours swimming, my skin turned mahogany, that salt water smell mixed with board wax and French fry grease, hanging out with my friends, Crosby, Stills, and Nash pouring from the speakers, and after-dark arthouse movies projected onto a screen set up in the sand.

Tiger-patterned cats with white feet patrolled the club in search of dropped fish tidbits. I didn’t mess with them, especially the notch-eared Tom, lording it over his domain.

For me, the best moments of any day are dawn and dusk. Being a morning person, I wake with a fully charged battery—so full of energy I feel I could eat the world—and get myself outdoors to embrace a new, honey-dipped day. Twelve or so hours later, after the heated bluster subsides, I celebrate those amber tones again.

In 1998, while walking the streets of Tianjin, I made up this little poem:

Embrace the morning
Endure the day
Celebrate the evening
Cherish the night

If things that lit me up were currency, I would be richer than Elon Musk!

For the first hour after the sun emerges from the Atlantic, it is only beach walkers.

The whole day stretching ahead like a magic carpet.

Once the sun is up, maintenance crews arrive to push around the sargassum, a floating seaweedy algae currently in bloom.

Each day’s sargassum washes up against a darker, older layer. We’d find a cut in the algae berm and wade into clearer water to swim. Later, after a shower, I’d see a stray sprig on the bathroom floor and laugh.

The palapa situation was super cushy. It was real fine watching everyone relax. Such a busy world we’ve made for ourselves with precious little time for doing nothing.

One afternoon a carpenter bee circled our heads looking for a hole to drill or one that it had already drilled. Ceaseless circling. Honestly, they seem so clueless I want to point to the hole and shout, “It’s right here, silly!”

Annoyed, the usually unperturbable Maya, blurted, “It would be nice to be in a room without flying bugs!” “All right,” I said, standing up, and went after the bee, clapping my rubber sandals together loudly until it flew off to find another palapa to pester.

I loved the ritual of rinsing the sand from my feet before climbing the stairs to the penthouse.

Saltwater is baked into my childhood. It’s where I learned to swim and where I played with my brothers, cousins, and friends for most of my childhood and a fair bit of my adulthood. I revel in ocean water, and the presence of algae only makes me feel more connected to this beautiful, unscripted world. Were it too perfect, I might have felt out of place.

Bob was a birder when I met him thirty-six years ago, but in an act of charitable solidarity, he chucked his life list and started over with a joint list for the two of us. No bird gets added until we both see it. In some cases, we’ll settle for both hearing the bird, as in the Yellow Cuckoo, a migrant we hear in our woods every summer but will probably never see.

We had 480 birds on our combined life list when we boarded our flight for Punta Cana, excited to add a few more. It’s worth mentioning here that there are about 10,000 species of birds worldwide, and that avid birders have lists in the thousands.

Explora Ecotour sent a driver to fetch us at 7:00 AM to take us an hour west of Punta Cana to Cotubanamá National Park on the Caribbean side. His name was Eduardo, and he pointed out sights along the way, including his neighborhood where he grew up and still lives.

Eduardo told us that when he was younger, Punta Cana was called Punta Borracho, which is Spanish for Drunk Point, but they changed it for obvious reasons. It would be fun to see if tourism revenue spiked after Punta Borracho became Punta Cana.

The only thing I want to say about Doña Pula is that when you see a giant woman in an apron, you have to stick your camera out the window and take her picture. We did not stop there to eat.

Our guide, Manny, spoke American English, had schooled in Florida, and started Explora Ecotour with his wife eighteen years ago. Manny was a delight and, we soon learned, politically aligned with us as all educated people tend to be. Funny how that is.

We met Manny at the end of the road on the east side of the resort and walked down a service road on the Parque Nacional Cotubanama side of the Cadaques Caribe Resort and Villas, turning at the beach and continuing south, a total of 1 1/2 miles.

The clouds had been threatening rain, but didn’t open up until we reached the beach, where we happily took cover in a maintenance shed. After the brief shower passed, we continued hiking south along a forest trail with views of the beach.

One of the first birds Manny picked out was the Vervain Hummingbird, which, at less than two and a half inches long including its bill, is the second-smallest bird in the world.

The Hispaniolan Mango hummingbird has a curved bill and is twice the size of the Vervain.

Palmchat (Dulus dominicus)

This cute little lizard’s for you, Steph.

Manny helped us add sixteen new birds to our life list, the most colorful being the Tody, a tiny bird related to the kingfisher with a bright green back, yellow underparts, a red chin, and pink flanks that it fluffs in warning. As in “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll cute you to death!”

It was at least an hour before Manny could lure the Tody into lens range. I wondered why he was trying so hard, telling myself, No big deal; we saw plenty of other birds, underappreciating his determination, until I saw it. Seriously, the Tody was the highlight of my day!

We saw Hispaniolan Woodpeckers during our walk with Manny, but Bob snapped this photo during morning coffee on our penthouse terrace.

No trip to the Caribbean is complete without a glimpse of the Magnificent Frigatebird, even if they are pirates. So are Bald Eagles and Brown Pelicans.

The skies were still moody on our drive back to Punta Cana, and we noticed several rock walls that resembled bulldozed rubble.

On the way home, Eduardo pulled over so that I could get a picture of a resort with a fanciful name. I asked Eduardo and Bob, if they had to choose, would they choose Secrets or Dreams? For me, I’d choose Secrets because secrets are usually juicier, with a more intelligible storyline. Which one would you prefer?

We would be staying at the Ocean View Penthouse on Calle Pirata a block from Playa Arena Gorda in Punta Cana.

Bob and Henry have been friends since they were fifteen and roomed together at The American School In Switzerland. We knew we’d have a good time with him and Kelly because four years ago we’d celebrated Bob’s birthday with them at Kitty Hawk and had a blast.

To make this trip even nicer, they brought their daughter, Maya. Henry’s sister, Daisy, his brother, Juan, and Juan’s wife, Nancy, were also in town to attend to some family business.

We quickly discovered that Maya had a wonderful sense of humor and spoke flawless Spanish like her father. She ran interference between us and the locals and was also soon fixing all the old people’s smartphone issues.

Our daily routine looked like this: Henry, the provisioner, was the first up. He made coffee for the house. Next, Bob would pour himself a cup and join Henry on the terrazzo terrace.

About this time, the woodpeckers would start working their way up the palms outside the terrace.

Eventually, we’d all make it out there.

Next, Kelly and I would take a long walk on the beach, water swirling around our feet. Then we’d meet the others at Villa Blanca Beach Club. for breakfast. I was especially fond of the Chilaquiles.

By mid-morning we’d have a swim, followed by some world class lounging in a large thatched palapa with cushioned chairs and couches. Tough times.

Eventually Bob and I would leave the beach to siesta in our room. I would ground myself with some low level housework before lying on the cool floor to stretch. Then I’d join Bob on the bed to read Donna Tartt’s, “The Goldfinch” which, if you have not read it is most definitely a page-turner.

I enjoyed ducking through the Dutch door to the terrace to join the others or check the towels I’d left out to dry. It gave me the same secret thrill I used to get when I was eleven squeezing through a thin spot in the privet hedge between our house and the riding stables.

One day, after the tap water spurted and died, I took the blue mop bucket downstairs, dipped it into the swimming pool, and brought it back in case anyone wanted to flush a toilet.

We lost water twice, and Juan guessed correctly that it had something to do with the construction going on next door. Turns out they had broken the water main.

On about the third day, I ventured out in search of drinking water. I had been studying the foot traffic and felt I knew the formula that would paint me as a self-contained expat rather than a target for solicitation: boring green shorts, a baggy tee, money tucked into a pocket, nothing dangling from my shoulder, shoes and socks, a fast pace, and no gawking. It worked. Even the Poppi Express drivers ignored me when I hustled by with a bag of mangoes tied around one wrist and a gallon of water dangling from each hand. I was invisible!

You might say water was the overarching theme. Water for drinking swimming, and flushing.

It was off season and there was plenty of renovation going on: next door and on the street below, men chipping concrete using shovels, saws, and pick axes.

A pigeon on a roof made me think about my grandfather Frank Illo, with his dream of raising white pigeons once he retired from show biz in New York City. Sadly, that dream was never realized.

Five days flew by and we found ourselves at the airport queuing up for a 3:30 flight. It was noon. Bob steered us toward a side office where he bought us VIP passes so we wouldn’t have to stand in a herd of travelers waiting to pass through immigration and customs, a process that could take two hours.

Believe you me, I felt like a rich person as they ushered me down a deserted corridor. Well worth the $35. It was a new program, he said when I asked how he’d heard of it, and he’d seen it on Reddit or TripAdvisor. Pays to have your own travel agent browsing for deals.

Thirteen hours later, we’d arrive home, porch light glowing, with its good well water, and cool summer hot tub, our heads buzzing with memories. No beach to greet us in the morning, no friends to share coffee with on the terrace. Just the finches clamoring for seed, the hummingbirds hoping for sugar water, and the garden sagging with unharvested fruit.

Nothing added up: why the bird at the feeder looked like a dove with a big head when she knew it must be a juvenile cardinal or why, despite the unexpected coolness, the air refused to refresh, unwilling to reach the bottom of her lungs, or why the vaporous fabric of her dreams now enveloped her once-familiar back yard.

Everything seemed disturbingly out of reach, like a language she was suddenly unable to read, like a book held too close, like how the word elephant ceases to have any meaning after said aloud fifteen times.

She was torn between resistance and acquiescence. Should she square her frame and march forward with purpose, forcing the day to come into intelligible focus? Or flop into the hammock and rock herself back into a comfortable stupor?

This hazy dilemma was proof that she needed no outside stimulus to keep herself amused. Her imagination had followed her into retirement like a faithful dog and she would not want for entertainment.

Blah, blah blah, practicing cursive. Sometimes cursing. Musing, venting, observing, and occasionally writing stories. Perfecting comma placement.

On a good day, I take my coffee to the back porch rocking chair and let the words flow, distracting myself from the day ahead, the number on the bathroom scale, the unbearable headlines, and my stagnant dumbells.

This is my “Me” time, filling pages with ink I buy off Amazon. It’s a good way, a friend reads somewhere, to stave off dementia. Something about the hand-eye-brain connection that differs from fingers on a keyboard.

On a not so good day, I don’t have or take the time to sit on the back porch with paper and pen. When this notebook is full I’ll add it to the stack of already-full notebooks, building my tower of words one inch at a time.

I first heard about this relatively new park four years ago from my friend, Amy. She also wonders if Cane Creek might be an epicneter of unusually good weather.

We always meet in the parking lot where we admire the forest green trees against that piercing blue sky with the white white clouds. I’m sure I’ve told her how some day I’m going to crochet an afghan in these colors because it’s the thing I usually say in situations like this.

After Cane Creek built the Monadnock Lookout Tower, Amy said, “Let’s go!” so we picked a date in May.

We were halfway up the 80-foot tower when Amy turned and told me that she has an uneasy relationship with heights. However, she pushed ahead and 70 steps later Amy was standing on top.

I scanned the horizon, trying to pick out landmarks and vowed to bring my camera with the big lens next time.

Six weeks later I returned with Emma, who when I told her about the tower, had said, “Let’s do it.” Once again, it was a perfectly crisp, dry morning. I swear this is some kind of Alamance County Park juju.

Emma and I head up the trail at what I think is a respectable pace until we are passed by a jogger, a thin woman who shouts over her shoulder, “Therapy!” in response to my, “You go!”

Emma confesses that she isn’t comfortable with heights, so I suggest she go first like Amy did in order to strike her own pace. “The platforms are the worst,” she says. “I don’t like how you can see through them.”

I consider this while staring through the metal grid, wondering what are the chances that two of my friends might express a desire to climb something that gives them the heebie jeebies.

I recently learned about the Visual Cliff experiments from the ’60s in which babies who would crawl across a platform to reach their mothers, refused when that platform was made of plexiglass. The hypothesis being that humans are hardwired to avoid the air space between trees lest we fall to our deaths.

My five brothers and I are all goats—we’ll climb anything—and I can’t wait to bring them here. Although they may not enjoy it as much as the towers they have to squeeze through locked gates to climb, those danger boys, now in their 60s and 70s.

Emma and I reach the big platform at the top with its sturdy rails and magnificent view, a giant American flag clapping for our triumph, and a nice breeze to wick away the sweat of our efforts.

I point out the nuclear plant some 40 miles to the south. I admire Emma’s courage, admire her for boldly pushing herself upwards to stand here in the breeze looking down into the overstory. She isn’t even holding on to the railing.

I point to the north, to a cluster of man-made towers and Emma says, “I think that’s Durham.”

After we’ve had our fill of thrill, we walk back down and take turns posing with the warning sign at the bottom. To wit:

Climb at your own risk. Falls from the tower may result in death or serious injury.
Tower may be used during park hours of operation only.
Do not climb on or lean over railing.
Visitors under the age of 18 cannot climb the tower without being accompanied by an adult.
Any visitors with health issues should be supervised while on the tower.
Park management reserves the right to close the tower at any time without notice.

We are nearly back to the lot when our jogger reappears. “Therapy!” I shout, and she laughs. “It beats housework!”

We stop to admire the way the sun is highlighting flora and fauna on the bank of a thin creek and crouch beside the wooden bridge to watch a half dozen damselflies flirt above the rocks.

I point out some chanterelles—Emma’s first—and she grows as excited as she did with the blueberries we’d been seeing along the trail. “We have to go foraging sometime!”

By the time we reach our cars, I am infused with friendship, endorphins, and hope. What a great use of tax dollars! What a great Country! This sure beats war and detention centers, ballrooms and arches. If Alamance County can do this, maybe the old U. S. of A. isn’t entirely broken.