When the Kids Come Home to Visit

March 13, 2024|Rick Juliusson

How do we show love for our children after they leave the nest? One way is rolling out the red (or, in this case, green) carpet when they grace us with a visit.

Yesterday morning, as Zekiah and three roommates were having a last swim at Tamarindo Beach then hopping a bus up the mountain to join us here in Monteverde, our morning looked like this. Make a fresh batch of granola. Start the bean soup for lunch. Move into the smaller bedroom and wash the sheets so they can all squeeze into the king-sized bed and couch. Sadly the yogurt we started the night before didn’t set, meaning an unexpected ricotta-cheese-making session and a 15-minute uphill trail run to Benito’s farm for more milk to try again. Bake bread and brownies using the sourdough starter I fed the night before. And of course the thing they’ll notice least of all - clean.

That was all just 6:00-9:30 am the morning-of. The Friday before, I jogged 40-minutes into town to the farmer’s market to stock up on fresh fruit (mango, pineapple, passion-fruit, granadilla, banana, plantain… see photo below), veggies, juice, snacks, etc. The backpack and two cloth bags were so full and heavy that I actually succumbed to catching the bus back, then lugged them the 20 minutes back downhill to our house.

Then again the day before arrival I returned to town (this time a 70-minute jog via a back mountain trail and a waterfall swim-hole) to once again fill the backpack and cloth bag with meat and more supplies to be carried the one-hour walk home. And another trip to Benito’s farm to get his home-grown ground lamb, milk, blackberry jam, eggs and butter.

Plus all the planning, logistics, mapping trails and sites to Wow them - only to remember that 20-year-olds have their own agendas and sleep patterns. A 1.5-hour hike to the paradise water-fall? That’s too much hiking. The meal plan sounds great, but eating-out at CASEM and Taco-Taco are higher priority. A silent Quaker meeting at the school to relive the old days - too early and too silent. A thousand-dollar sunset happening on the porch - “but we’re looking at our photos on the couch!”

So the revised itinerary evolves - day one starts with bean soup and tortilla lunch then some down time for our weary travelers (something about jumping in the hotel pool at 3am last night…) A much more modest but ever-beautiful and appreciated forest walk. Moroccan lamb meatballs and rice dinner, then enjoy watching them playing cards at the table while I clean up and make yogurt and concoct a mango-passionfruit coulis to top the brownies for dessert.

Today we’ll take them to the hollow stranger-fig tree that they can climb up inside. Visit the old school, then pop by the cheese factory for some ice-cream en route to the waterfall below Rio Shanti. Lunch at CASEM, the women’s coop with the best local food in town, then off they go to zip-line and Tarzan swing while we go to Thursday afternoon scrabble. Meet up at their beloved Taco-Taco for dinner, after which I suspect I’ll lose the “It’s a beautiful 1-hour walk home in the dark” argument. Then the next day the roommates leave and we get our boy for one more day on his own.

So much prep work for such a short visit. But so worth it. What a Joy it is to see them actually appreciate the food, melt into the sunset view from our porch, gasp in awe at the gargantuan and intricate beauty of the forest enveloping us, and marvel at the sensation of walking in the midst of a cloud. And seeing our son interacting with his wonderful friends, hearing them laughing and fighting over blanket-hogging deep into the night.

Children, we will always happily bake and shop and clean and shift bedrooms and clear our schedules and let you change our perfect plans for the magic of sharing these moments of our lives. And unless you happen to read your parents’ blog, you’ll never need to know the behind-the-scenes scurrying that preceded that exuberant “Welcome Home” hug and (always too soon) teary “Go Back into Your World” smile.

PS - The day did go as planned. First a Costa Rican breakfast feast with fried plantains, gallo pinto (rice & beans), fried cheese, scrambled eggs, mango juice, and fresh papaya & pineapple:

Then a climb up inside a hollow Strangler Fig tree I found on our property (look carefully, all 4 youth are up there):

Then a hike that included crawling under a barbed-wire fence...

... then voyaging upstream...

...to finally reach the waterfall swimspot

Lunch at CASEM was followed by ziplining and Tarzan swings (while us old folx played scrabble).

Our dear friend Kay joined us for the TacoTaco feast (including a pitcher of margaritas for our Legal-Age-in-Costa-Rica youth) and she drove us home, robbing me of the chance to futilely lobby for a romantic one-hour walk home in the dark through the middle of a cloud (Sarah and I did get to do that last night and it was marvelous!). We did get the final 15-minutes of steep forested downhill to our house, turning off flashlights to enjoy the symphony of sound and the firefly light show.

Sarah and I retired at 9:30, falling asleep to the delightful sound of four dear friends playing cards and laughing as only young people in love with each other and with life can laugh (and us holding each other and smiling as only old parents in love with our children can smile).