REFLECTIONS

I drive down our street, Soi Yodsane, which means Love Charm Lane, past the gray bulks of elephants living in our village. Mamas, with tattered ears, orange splotches and freckles, long, creamy tusks, stand watching their bright-eyed infants. Every dawn they walk with their mahouts to bathe in a nearby creek, feeding on the grasses and looking greedily at the gardens along the way. Now, still early, they are back, foraging among the rows of rubber trees.

Breakfasting in JimmyÌs Lighthouse waiting for the dive boat, I look out at Ao Chalong, thinking that the mangroves to the East look healthier. Along the nearer crescent I can see boats whose designs span centuries. Long tails and twin-tailed Malay canoes, hand adzed, float against the shore. Most have spirit features inscribed for protection. The designs are beautiful, some are arcane, each boat a singular canvas. The sleek, white cruisers and mathematically honed sailboats moored all across the bay have modern color motifs that proffer no appeal to those specters.

I spend the day diving at Phi Phi watching golden sea horses. These limestone islands are incarnations from my dreams; once I believed they only existed in Chinese brushed-ink scrolls. Vertical, hollow, walls smeared with monkish orange and hung with huge stalactites, cliffs and spires decorated with epiphytic figs and sea eagles, these islands have a special magnetism. Every time I step on Koh Phi Phi Leh I feel a surge of wonder that this impossible place actually exists. The beaches of smooth sand, golden, wild hibiscus and spider lilies, edge water warmer even than the dreams of travelers from chill, gray climes, water that is at first clear, then pale, transparent green and finally ink blue. This sea is endowed with a living richness of movement, textures and patterns, rainbow colors worn by fish and other animals displaying tropical brilliance. The corals look healthy and there are fewer plastic bottles and flip-flops on the beach and in the bay for me to ignore.

Heading back, I can see the monsoon wavering, swinging to the Southwest, swirling clouds upward in the East. I can smell it. It is richer, bearing island bouquets of ginger, vanilla and wet jungle salted by sea air. At Chalong the winter visitorsÛpeople and birdsÛare mostly gone. A few linger, some will stay through summer rain, or remain year round.

Sitting on our North-facing balcony, hills to the left, I watch gray clouds, seemingly too thin to carry rain, scudding fast away from the sun. Below a high, vaulted sky of lighted popcorn clouds, unmoving on translucent blue, the trees thrash in the wind. The rain drum-rolls on the aluminum awnings our nearest neighbor recently installed. I like their music in the blowing rain, tin roofs I remember from my childhood.

Across the pond, the orchard is uncharacteristically green, the result of a record amount of rain in the Spring, durian trees festooned with mace-like fruit and bananas drooping huge, purple flowers. The rain has driven the Black Drongos, singing blackbird songs, to shelter. There are smooth, green and chocolate brown frogs on the railing below me, dark eyes alert, chirping a single complex note, that almost harmonizes with the cricketsÌ sawing din.

The sun is beginning to turn the low clouds a rich cream; the sky, now quiet and too clear for orange, replays every myth and legend of God-made dome and canopy. Finally, a banner of egrets diagonals Northeast to roost, taking with them the last reflections of the day.

Elephants walk silently, silhouetted against the gathering darkness, up our soi, part of the going home traffic. There are fireflies flashing, and the frogs that sound like race cars are headed for the finish line in our pond.

These are images that I carry, like small change, that I can jingle into my consciousness whenever I want, Thai coins magically minted, preserved in time and space for me to touch and turn over in the pockets of my memory.