I never imagined I would be wearing a beanie in May and looking down at birds from over 16,000 feet above sea level. The air was as clear as it was thin, making breathing both a physical and emotional reaction to the moment. I grabbed my husband’s hand as the clouds moved like rolling wisps across the pending ascent.
Our tour guide narrated facts about our scene, which tried to make sense of what we were witnessing, but it blew our minds even more. There is no version of that experience that could have been foretold to former versions of ourselves. You couldn’t have told us that our 17th wedding anniversary would be spent hiking up Chimborazo, an inactive volcano with a peak of over 20,000 ft above sea level that nestles itself in the Andes mountains in Ecuador.
My husband is the best at planning trips that bring together adventure and a sense of wonder. This year started off with more adventure than we bargained for, so there needed to be a call to calm and perspective. It's been five years since we’ve done an anniversary trip and we no longer have elementary-school-aged kids, but teenagers with more freedom and busy schedules.
For some reason, this brought new types of anxiety for me as a mother. I did not realize the joy of my children building their future also meant that my present would shift so much. I spent the first part of their childhood building an on-ramp into adolescence, and now it is an offramp into adulthood. I don’t know why I equated one anniversary trip to a drastic step into the future.
However, unconsciously I did.
Landing in Guayanquil, and traveling seven hours to Baños with no cell service, created space that I didn’t know we needed — individually and as a couple. Our driver wound us through foggy single lane roads to this quaint town. My husband and I made time pass quickly — talking, sleeping, and everything in between. When we arrived at our destination, we already had been emptied of so much mental weight and were eager to explore Baños.
Baños served as a mountainous gateway to the Andes and the Amazon, teeming with cultures, peoples, and perspectives we desperately needed. Truthfully, this could be said of any place — traveling changes you. Places around the globe can take your breath away, leave you in awe, or some mix of both. That’s the gift of traveling: perspective. Reorienting yourself around time, space, and its growth changes how you see where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
All the hardships of the first six months of this year seemed to color the coming time in unexpected hues, when growth happens right when you think you’ve mastered its timing. It is rarely said that an anniversary trip brings growth, but maybe it did.
And that’s a beautiful, scary, weird, thing.
Just as beautiful and scary it was to be standing on the side of a volcano where we could not breathe. Even as we descended, the view remained something to take in and to see what we’d already seen in a new way. We took the same path up as we did down, but there was still something new to discover.
I didn’t intend to make our trip super poetic, or even share it with you in this article. But I’d be remiss to not share my view from the side of that volcano. July usually closes the summer — mentally for parents and woefully for children. But I would venture, as always, to change the perspective. Let the fireworks bloom and history unfurl itself in its bloody beauty for who and what our country is.
With that, I invite you to do the same for your own past. Offer yourself perspective, both in how you look back and how you climb forward, through tummy time, potty training, kindergarten, fifth grade, or the idea of college tours and applications.
Shift with the growth and change the perspective. You might witness a view that is a beautiful thing.
Cheers to your celebrations, and discoveries.
Diamone Ukegbu is a local Little Haiti artist, creative, teacher, mom and wife who is in the throes of raising three children while trying to keep her sanity.
