When the pandemic struck, many of my coworkers returned to the States. We never seriously contemplated the same, but I recall those first few harried days of curfews and the looming threat of a lockdown as fearful and harried.
By staying in Sri Lanka, I assumed many of my departed colleagues’ duties on top of my own. For a stretch of six week in the wild heart of the summer, I worked 12-14 hours days, many spent sitting at the dining room table, taking calls, responding to emails, and leading various teams.
Our trip to Unawatuna was a revisit, of sorts. This was the sleepy surf twin we had visited on our original sojourn to Sri Lanka five years ago when we were living in South India. This time, we stayed at Kaju Green Eco Lodge and slept in open air cabanas under mosquito nets, the closest to camping we have had in the last year, opening ourselves up to the screech of crickets, chirping of geckos, and chorus of morning birds. Daily, we would fine giant monitor lizards, stalking through the swamp beside the lodge and slithering in and out of the muck.
We canoed through mangroves and went down to the shore one morning where the kids were able to play in the shallows for hours until lunch. We had lunch at a surfside pizza shack, the same one we took my mom to that many years ago, the one with the whalebone in the courtyard. I don’t know if anyone besides Elise and I remembered being there, but the Lion lager tastes the same and was just as cold.
At one point, we found a small squirrel under a chair in our room, frightened until Sam coaxed it into his hand and set it free.
The rain started after lunch and wouldn’t stop for a day. Not an intermittent sprinkle but steady, gushing rain, a constant drumming, percussion, on the roofs of the lodges. For hours we read, rested, napped, drank wine. The kids listened to music. I gazed out at the rain, emptying my mind. Toward the end of the day, Elise wondered if there was any water left in the clouds. How long until they were empty?
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