The Moroccan Two-Step in Four-Four Time

Saturday night, after I dropped the last visitor off at the airport, I turned the sign on the door, so to speak. Despite the fact that I still seem to have a straggler on the couch, this guest house is "now closed for the season" and life will return to normal, whatever that is.

I always have mixed feelings about this moment of the year when there are no more expectations of friends coming to visit or new travels on the immediate horizon. It's exhausting but at the same time a grand gift to have a revolving door that deposits so many wonderful people in my foyer or sends me to so many fabulous places to visit them. However, this year I'm done. Worn out. Definitively finished. I've been drained…literally!

I've spent the last two weeks with my dear friends and fellow troublemakers from our London days.

One I've kept in contact with since that semester so long ago and another we reconnected with three years ago. The two have come here together for the past two years. This year however, we finally found the fourth member of our posse and we were all together for the first time in 20 years.

My grand idea for a little side trip this year was to jump on over to Morocco for 4 days so after a short 1 1/2 days in France we flew to our exotic destination. I'll write more about Morocco in a future post but I will tell you what we came home with from that trip.

Tourista (in French)…otherwise know as Montezuma's Revenge, Turkey Trots, Delhi Belly or you may fill in the blank here with whatever name you find amusing ___________. The fact is, it wasn't.

Two of us fell ill while in Morocco and our fear was that we wouldn't be able to get back, but a break in the action lasted just long enough to get back to France, where it started all over again in full force.  So there we were, 4 women locked in my little apartment (thank god it has 2 toilets), no escape. Periodic sorties for more toilet paper and nourishment were all we could manage and by the end of their trip, my friends had managed to see:

1. A couple of streets in Aix en Provence
2. Fes, Morocco
3. The inside of my apartment with a special concentration on the bathrooms.

My poor girls. My poor stomach. This is a really SHITTY way to lose a couple of kilos. And one should never lose kilos on a trip to the south of France. I believe it's forbidden, actually.

So we talked, we laughed, we cried, we watched Gone With the Wind all the way through. We attempted meals. We gave up. We stepped over each other and on each other. We discussed our gastrointestinal systems to no end. Potty humor became our means of survival. We napped. We talked some more and laughed and cried all at the same time.  And we had a wonderful time. Really.

My living room on a normal day

My living room after 4 days locked inside

My bedroom after the same 4 days of confinement

For all of us, new wrinkles and sags, creaks and aches have hitched a ride with the years, as have precious moments and beloved memories.  Time has also brought with it unimaginable tragedy for one of our lives and deep sadness and loss for all of us in one form or another. Those things that were unthinkable in our youth and most definitely not in the in the plans we had for ourselves.

What amazed me is that in spite of it all, we are really all the same people that we were back in 1980. On the other hand, because of it all, we are not. Each of these wonderful women has taken what life has thrown directly in her gut with no gentleness whatsoever, and has produced something good and hopeful from the pain. It is for this that they are not the same women I knew then. They are better. I am so proud to know them and be a part of their lives. I hope they come back. I would really like for them to see more than this...

or this...

and most especially this!

Next year I think we'll go to St. Tropez!