We’re back in the U.S. after three weeks in Tobago, our first trip there since covid.

It was tough going to the same places over four years later, and seeing how big the kids had gotten. They were no longer aging an hour or a day at a time, but four years all at once. Our oldest wasn’t able to join us for the first time. Our youngest doesn’t remember our other trips. Two kids are now young adults. Two more are about to be. More than that, *I* felt older.

We’d completed a colossal temporal leap forward in between this trip and our last, and all the things that had happened in between were on my mind, which meant I cried kind of a lot.

I could see and feel the four years in my bones, in the look on my face. It wasn’t just covid. So much family stuff happened in that time. So many historic events on the world stage. The last nine months watching the genocide of Palestinians. It added a lot of mileage.Yet every day, we saw something magical.

I saw the silhouette of a horseshoe crab just a few feet away from one of the kids in the clear green glass of a wave. Another day, we were jumping waves and looked up to see a flock of birds circling above us, including a pair of pelicans.The most memorable image from Gaza the first week in Tobago: a baby, breathing shaky breaths and too shocked to cry, covered with shrapnel wounds head to toe.

I saw rainbows. I saw a flock of bright green birds fly across a rain forest valley. I saw a big, high stepping green lizard launch across the main road through traffic in the dark and make it to the other side. A grey, three foot long fish swam underneath me and somehow I was not afraid.We took a Jurassic hike into the rain forest up a trail on the Main Ridge. The gigantic leaves of the plants, the throbbing aliveness, made it seem like a raptor or compsognathus could appear at any moment.

I saw school after school of leaping fish, including one group that was the color of the sea and gave the effect of the water leaping out of itself in a delightful arc of individual fish shapes before diving back in again, over and over again. I saw purple, yellow, and blue fish. There was a blindingly sunny day on No Man’s Land where I had the most amazing bake and shark I’ve ever eaten, and got to try pholourie for the first time. How have we been going to Tobago for sixteen years and I never had pholourie?

The most memorable images from Gaza the second week in Tobago: Palestinian body builder Moazez Abayat had been returned from an Israeli prison a shadow of his form self, his body wasted and broken. A young man with Down Syndrome named Mohammed, mauled by an Israeli combat dog. His family was forced to watch and then prevented from getting to his body for days afterward. His last words were to the dog: “Let go, habibi, enough.”There was the choppy trip across the Atlantic to Little Tobago. We’d talked about going there for years. Now that we’ve done it, we’ll never go again. It made me so seasick that when we stopped midway back, they put me in a life preserver and sent me out to float so I could hopefully settle my stomach. It didn’t work, but the views were spectacular.

I ran or walked the 30-40 degree incline up to our villa multiple times a day. I made eye contact with a lizard. A hummingbird landed on my hand. I saw live steel pan. I watched the kids’ swimming skills improve.
The kids learned how to use a conch shell as a horn. We went on boats, waded, swam, hiked, and ate good, local food. We flew along in our rental van up and down winding, narrow switchbacks to waterfalls and the biggest tree in Tobago and a restaurant built around a tree situated on the beach.

We saw hazy sunsets and colorful sunsets and grey sunsets. We spent time with friends and family. We stayed so long that even I was being recognized in public. (“I’ve seen yuh out runnin’ in the mornings. Yuh finally gettin’ a tan.”)Standing on a boat waiting for our turn to snorkle, laughing at ourselves in our silly life vests, I started to sing a soca song and the captain of the ship swung around to look at me and asked where I was from. Later he asked the kids again if we weren’t over from Trinidad.

The most memorable image from Gaza the third week in Tobago: a man tenderly kissing the cheek of a dead baby. Abu Abdullah works as a cleaner at Baptist Hospital in Gaza, and hadn’t been home for months. Then, the bodies of his family, including his baby grandson whom he’d never met, were brought into the hospital after their home was hit by an Israeli missile strike.Back at home, one of our cats slipped out of the house. At first it was just a text from our oldest. He hadn’t seen the cat in a few days. Then several days of our cat sitters and our son looking for him. The cat doesn’t see my son often, and was afraid of our cat sitters, so could we be sure he wasn’t just hiding somewhere?

A text: We can’t find him.

A text: I think your freezer is broken.Once it was confirmed the cat was missing, I froze. What could we do from Tobago? None of us had a phone number where we could be reached from the U.S. We weren’t at our house, creating all the noise and smells that might tempt our cat to come home. He’d have been missing for ten days before we even got home.

Then, the Saturday before we left Tobago, our nine year old went with his siblings to an abandoned building next to our villa. They had been there before. I didn’t check to see what shoes they were wearing –  who wouldn’t wear sneakers to explore an abandoned house?Too soon, our fearless son was led back by his older sister, covered in blood. Eventually we learned he was doing parkour, in slides, on damp cement. He was jumping from one ledge to another, four or five feet apart, ten feet off the ground.

He broke both of his front teeth and split his lip wide open.We went to the emergency room. They took our name and basic info – no specific address, just a phone number (which they understood was a nonworking U.S. phone number, because we had nothing else), and his date of birth. No insurance info. No ID.

They fed us a full meal in the waiting room, and within three hours we were discharged with a stitch placed by a plastic surgeon who had been called in, and a prescription for antibiotics. (Universal healthcare, on a tiny island in the Caribbean.)The kids played clapping games and competed with each other on a geography app to pass the time when we were at the villa. They bickered endlessly. We ate local ice cream. We spotted lizards around the house – on the window, on the stairs, in the washing machine.

The trip was healing, but it felt like we paid for it: with the cat, with the freezer, with the front teeth.

When we got home, I went to look at the freezer. There were rivulets of brown liquid coming out of the bottom of it. I’d caught a virus while we were away (I suspect Covid) and couldn’t smell anything. Cylon, whose fully functional sense of smell is not as sensitive as mine usually is, tried twice to clean it and had to stop because he couldn’t do it. When I opened the door, there were maggots and flies everywhere.When I started throwing out the contents of the freezer, I found the placentas of my four youngest kids. I have a tradition of burying the placentas from our home births under trees and shrubs in the yard. The youngest kids are aged seven to twelve, so obviously there is a backlog, but they held tremendous sentimental value. There was no saving any of it. Customer service offered us $150 to cover the cost of the loss.

As I cleaned out the freezer, mopping up meat juices and trying to get rid of the flies, I cried. I would stop and then the tears would start again.

I was crying about our missing cat. I was crying about the placentas and everything they represented. I cried thinking about them sitting in a garbage bag on the curb, never to find a resting place under a tree. I cried for our cat, hiding silently somewhere nearby and waiting for days, never hearing us call for him, never seeing us, not knowing what to do.In the past week, I’ve seen three different beheaded Palestinian babies. This coming month will be one of traveling or working every weekend. I don’t know how I’ll shoehorn in my activism. I don’t know how the freezer will ever not smell of rotten meat or if I can convince the repairmen they need to just replace it.

I don’t know when I can look for the cat or if it would even help after this long. I’m not sure how our house can ever feel OK without our cat in it. The other cats meow all the time now, plaintively as if to shout at us for leaving them for so long. And maybe they are missing their brother?One of the cats puked up live worms the day we got home. When I called the vet, they said they needed a stool sample. I said, so you can’t take a sample of live worms the cat just left on the floor? How am I supposed to isolate a poop sample from one cat when two of ours share a litter box? Why can’t you take the worms we ALREADY HAVE?

I want to focus on the magic of the trip. I’m going to have to let the photos tell the story. I don’t know how to fix the things that are wrong. A sick cat, a missing cat, missing teeth, a broken freezer, broken trust in the broken freezer.The whole time in Tobago, I kept thinking, I should be writing these miraculous things down! But I never did. From the time we left, the individual moments started fading, the many things we decided just to be present for, instead of trying to get photos.

Every time you come home from a mountaintop experience, there’s a low. And I am low. We’ve been told cats can take a long time to come back, but it’s difficult to feel hopeful.I’m trying to ease back into regular life, find my rhythm again, and use the fuel from the Tobago magic to get me through the coming months.

It’s magical here, too. I just have to find it.