Nostalgia is a strange loop.

Lumaco has changed a lot since I lived there five years ago. There’s a new municipal development across from my family’s tiny carnicería—before there were just tufted hills. There’s a new upstairs to my Chilean house, with rooms for boarders and a vaulted view of this rapidly growing rural village. There are fine lines around my host mother’s eyes, internet access in my host-home, and a supermarket.

Some things haven’t changed, though. Bread is still cooked in a wood-fire oven and served with avocado and cheap tea. The television is still incessant in its broadcast of tacky music videos, and roosters still crow outside of my window. Lumaco means “water of the trees” in the language of the native Mapuche people, and Lumaco’s brown river still bustles through on its determined course through the pine forests Southern Chile.  I don’t think it ever noticed my absence, or cared that I returned.

One evening I went running alone on the same gravel road where I always used to run, back when I was a lost seventeen-year-old feeling trapped in spiritual gridlock of small town life. Drunkards wavered to their countryside homes as the sun wavered on the horizon, and my lungs filled with the rich scent of wood-smoke. It was just like I remembered, except for this time everything was on my own terms.

Nathaniel and I went to Lumaco last weekend, and, over extended broadcasts of the Chilean Miner Rescue Mission, I tentatively reformed my connection with the dreary lost loving place that I once called home.  I had been afraid of returning to such a complicated nexus of memory, but Nathaniel played my host brother’s guitar and we drank tea and laughed and talked about the moon. I relaxed and flirted with some kind of atonement.

I was glad to get on the southward-bound bus, though, and watch Lumaco’s hills melt back into memory. I don’t want to live that life, and I never did. I prefer to carry it with me as I move, buried somewhere deep in my strange mosaic of self. Now I’m hoeing thistle and collecting alien-brain seed pods outside of Valdivia (see Nathaniel’s post for details), and the journey continues to evolve.

Tonight, I think, I will toast my tea evolution of journeys.  And to the color of Chile in the spring.