To British Honduras

My blond Bucher returned with a full reddish beard to announce enthusiastically, “You have to see that place. It’s like walking twenty-five years into the past.”

“Shall I start packing?”

“Not until after I shave.”

As I remember it, I was holding the paintbrush with which I still was staining paneling in our not-quite-finished house. The first thing I did was firmly seal my tin of paint.

My second project was to try to behave like a calm, meticulous mother as I planned and packed, when all I wanted to do was dance and sing, the last being an activity forbidden me by the family in self-defense. Bucher took care of details I neither knew nor wanted to know about.

While Bucher had been off on his adventure, the children and I developed a daily ritual of kneeling together on the floor looking at the Atlas and tracing Daddy’s trip. Now five-year-old Alex was almost as excited as I at the unexpected vision of our own visit to Central America. Carli, age two, mirrored our delirium without understanding, because elation is its own excuse for being.

I took the children to the pediatrician for what both of them considered an unnecessary episode with a needle. He gave me some baby-strength calming tablets, which I did not think were necessary, and some advice that I knew was.

When the feverish pace of work threatened tempers, Bucher and I took the children for a swim, wading in the shallow waters or watching the scuttling lines of fiddler crabs migrating from one side of our sandy point to the other.

Two weeks after Bucher’s return, the house was closed, we were packed and set off for what we thought would be a three-month visit to British Honduras.