This morning, life woke me up at 3:00 a.m. I was not mad. I felt good. Each day I have been in Medellín, I have woken up an hour earlier than the day before. This morning, I actually woke up BEFORE the city. It was amazing. Virtually no sounds, except for air moving. I heard the first yelp of a dog, the voice of a man, and the roar of an engine at 3:48 a.m. Exactly. En punto.

Monday was Día de la Raza, which is a National Holiday in Colombia, and we spent it with my friend Sandra and her brother Enrique – this is their hometown. She happened to be here at the same time as us, and she planned a delightful day of seeing the city from the South to the North on the (extremely clean and well-maintained) Metro. We went to stroll through the Plaza Botero and the nearby area, and we took the MetroCable (a mother of a gondola system) into the heavens to Parque Arví, a lush, tropical forest with plants and flowers and succulents that I have never seen before and hope to see many times again. Enrique showed us how they take tiny baby plants and attach them to the trunks of the trees so that they can attach and grow to maturity there. Those plants had tags with the name of their genus and species as well as the date propagated on a little white tag. I need to ask them what writing implement they use on what kind of tag that that information is still quite legible after five or six years! I haven’t figured out how to get the name of the tomatoes I start from seed to remain visible from seed to sprout ever. Not once in my life.

We also feasted on a customary meal called ¨Bandeja Paisa¨– a more traditional version, served on enormous (well, not really enormous — exactly the natural sized) banana leaves. Then Sandra told us that when children go on school field trips here, their lunch would be wrapped and tied up in a similar banana-leaf paquete. A. could not eat all of his Bandeja Paisa, so the server deftly bundled and tied his leftovers in his banana leaves for enjoyment later. It was SO much food!

I realized when I saw Sandra come up the stairs from the Metro platform how excited I was to see her. I have not done a great job of keeping up with my people over the past fifteen years. It seems like that isolation began while I was still teaching, and I know it was because of my choice to isolate myself due to how difficult socializing became after getting married the first time and then having a baby. I have never been very adept and managing and integrating groups of people in my life, but I really downshifted after getting married the first time. My attempts at integrating my then-husband into some of my groups — the family, the teacher friends, the bilingual team, the Nashville people — failed almost exclusively. No. Not almost. They failed. Not all due to my ineptitude in that area. I wanted so much for it all to work, but insecurities and paranoia prevailed. And I was embarrassed. And exfiltrating myself (and what was left of my extroverted personality) seemed like the best way. It was what I needed to survive through those years, but I did not seek to recover The Old Me post-exfil.

The Old Me. She is making her way back. Poco a poco. Only the good parts, you see. Some aspects of The Old Me should stay in exile simply because they served their purpose — to remind me of the non-negotiability of my faith in God, to instill in me a passion for personal growth, to clarify that I do have a meaningful purpose in life, AND to forge a path for The New Me.

The New Me. The New Me works really hard to think before I speak, attend to details in life and in work, be the hands and feet of Jesus, and treat others the way I would like to be treated. Aspirational. Sometimes, I hit the mark. Many times I do not. And that does not feel good. I am better at recovering from setbacks these days, although sometimes, It takes me more than a little while.

I married again. And this time is the right time. Rather than exiling myself, I am quite proud to introduce H2 (my current and final husband) to my family and friends. And without exception, they love him. Because he’s lovable. And genuinely interested in people other than himself. And he quite evidently loves and cares for me. And that is what Daddies want for their daughters, isn’t it?

I hear the first delivery of the day on the street below.

Well. What I heard was very much the opposite of the first delivery of the day.

It was a male with a rickshaw laden with a large reusable bag, and he was sorting through the trash from the Hot Dogs Del Mono restaurant below, pulling out the recyclables from each of the black trash bags on the curb, scanning his surroundings warily, taking the occasional bite of food he pulled out of a box.

This city consists of a full spectrum of, well, everything. Economics, classes of people, foods, and all else that blend together to make a society.

I can honestly say, we’ve seen quite a bit of that spectrum.