A preface to a dispatch
A short read before we go to Tulum
I’m writing this note from the departures terminal at LAX, waiting for my delayed flight to board. It’s Mother’s Day, and I’m feeling a little nostalgic, a little melancholy… the way I always do when it comes to anything regarding my mom.
Before Alzheimer’s, my mother was an obsessively curious person. In another life she might have been an archaeologist or anthropologist. She was always absorbed in the relics of bygone civilizations - Celtic and Roman coins, African trade beads, a little basket of the arrowheads she turned up in her vegetable garden in the mountains of Northern California. She took me all over the planet, to whatever place had drawn her in. It was often to see ancient temple complexes - Cambodia, Bali, the jungles of Guatemala, all over Mexico. And wherever she went, she was studying… The history, the origin myths, the art, and the long-ago people who made it.
In the late nineties her fascination turned toward the ancient Maya of Quintana Roo, and when I was fourteen we took our first trip to the region. She handed me two books before we left, dog-eared things she had already devoured. The first was The Lost World of Quintana Roo by Michel Peissel, about a young French explorer walking the uninhabited coastline from Belize to Cancun alone in 1957, documenting ruins and collecting stories from the rare locals he encountered. The second was Dennis Tedlock's unabridged translation of the Popol Vuh, the Quiché Mayan book of creation. She wanted to see the temples standing sentinel on white sand, the cenotes framed by jungle, the ancient glyphs carved into stelae of plumed serpents and jaguar gods.
We went back almost every year after that, almost always based out of Tulum, which was just a dusty little town with a beautiful strip of mostly empty beachfront at that time. Over the years things changed quite a bit, but we would still find the last little hippie holdouts with cheap palapa style bungalows right on the beach.
Our last trip together was 2014. Over that week it became clear the disease was further along than I’d let myself believe, and I knew we wouldn’t be able to travel together anymore.
I’ve kept coming back though. It’s the place I go when I need to clear my head, as clichéd as that sounds. Even as it has changed dramatically, again and again - and it really has - I keep coming back.
This week I’ll be writing a travel dispatch from Tulum. It won’t be our usual overlapping grocery list format- there will be some recipes, but mostly it will be restaurants, cenotes, ruins, and the magic of this place that keeps changing, but to me, still retains its same soul.
More soon.
-Miranda