Sacred Places: Spain
Orange Trees, a Small Dog, and the Day Awe Came Back
Nine months after my life imploded, I got on a plane alone and flew to Spain.
I didn’t go to sightsee. I went because staying where I was felt impossible.
I didn’t speak the language. I had never traveled internationally by myself. The only person waiting for me was a coworker I had never met in person, someone I knew only through screens and late-night conversations during a dark stretch of my life.
It sounds reckless when I say it out loud.
At the time, it felt like the only sane choice I had left.
My online school paid for the flight as part of a wellness initiative, one of those rare moments when the universe lines up paperwork and grace at the same time. Nicole and her husband Rolando, Americans living outside Valencia, offered me a place to stay for as long as I needed. They had property nearby, space to spare, and hearts big enough to welcome someone who wasn’t really a stranger anymore.
February in Vermont is brutal even in a good year. That year, it felt unbearable. The day I left, the wind chill was twenty-six below zero. My face hurt walking to the car. The air felt hostile.
When I landed in Valencia, it was fifty-five degrees.
I remember wanting to lie flat on the pavement like a lizard and absorb the heat through my skin. Nicole showed up wearing a fleece jacket, hat, and scarf. I remember thinking we were clearly no longer living on the same planet.
My Own Dream Home
They gave me a villa that felt like something out of a dream. A huge bathroom. A big kitchen. Light everywhere. Outside, orange groves stretched toward the mountains. In the backyard were fruit trees, lemon, grapefruit, others waiting for their season, and a traditional stone paella oven. There was even a pool, closed for winter but still impossibly glamorous to my Vermont brain.
For the first time in months, I had space that was entirely mine. Not a room in someone else’s house. Not a temporary place to land. A home base.
And yet I was never alone unless I wanted to be.
Nicole and Rolando were the kind of hosts people write novels about and then worry they’ve made too perfect to be believable.
Rolando had this big, joyful energy, always moving, always building, always fixing something. He drove us anywhere we needed to go, refused to let us lift heavy things, and somehow still found time to tackle endless home projects around their property. He was good at it, too. The house felt like it was constantly evolving under his hands.
He also found my mission to “find a man while I was in Spain” absolutely hilarious. This became one of his favorite running jokes. Every outing was apparently an opportunity to scout candidates, most of whom existed only in his imagination.
He loved his dogs and cats fiercely, teased Nicole constantly, and radiated a kind of practical kindness that didn’t need to announce itself.
Nicole was different energy entirely. Quieter, deeply thoughtful, disarmingly real. The kind of person who makes you feel safe within minutes, not because she tries to, but because she simply is safe. She listened without interrupting, without fixing, without judging. She let me cry without making me feel dramatic or weak or inconvenient.
She showed me everything. Markets, hidden cafés, travel tricks, little cultural nuances you would never learn from a guidebook. She was adventurous in that grounded way that makes you brave just by being near her. And she loved food the way I do, with enthusiasm and zero apology.
Mostly, we talked. For hours. About everything and nothing. The kind of conversations that only happen when time isn’t chasing you.
They cooked constantly. Incredible meals from everywhere, not just Spain. One night they fired up the outdoor brick oven and made homemade pizzas under the open sky. The smell of wood smoke, melted cheese, citrus trees in the background, the easy banter between them that only long-married couples can pull off. It felt less like visiting and more like stepping into a life that already had a place for me.
I miss them more than I can comfortably admit. We’ve lost touch over the years in the way life sometimes pulls good people out of orbit, and it remains one of my quiet regrets. I hope they know how much that month meant to me.
They gave me something I didn’t realize I needed so badly: a place where I didn’t have to be strong.
A Small Dog Named Paco
Of all the animals, Paco chose me.
A tiny chihuahua with enormous loyalty, he appointed himself my personal shadow almost immediately. If I moved, he moved. If I sat, he climbed into my lap. If I lay in the sun by the pool trying to thaw months of Vermont winter from my bones, he stretched out beside me with his head resting on my legs as if this arrangement had always existed.
He wasn’t yappy or nervous like chihuahuas are rumored to be. Just deeply, unapologetically affectionate. A small, warm presence that asked for nothing except proximity.
In a house full of wonderful humans, he was still my constant companion. There is something profoundly comforting about being chosen by an animal. No history required. No explanations. No expectations. Just acceptance.
Paco has since passed, and I mourned him with a depth that surprised even me. Not just because he was a sweet dog, though he was. But because he was woven into that brief, luminous chapter of my life when everything finally stopped hurting quite so much.
Sometimes healing arrives in the form of a tiny dog who refuses to leave your side.
Spain itself felt like a sensory reset.
Everything was fresh. Truly fresh. Food tasted like food instead of chemistry. Coffee was stronger, richer, unapologetic. Markets overflowed with produce that hadn’t traveled halfway across a continent. Meals lasted longer. People lingered. No one seemed in a hurry to leave the table or their lives.
I spent days wandering Valencia, open markets, bakeries, cafés, streets that felt both ancient and alive. I tasted everything I could, listened to conversations I couldn’t understand, let myself be a stranger in the best possible way.
Barcelona felt like stepping into a different universe entirely.
Architecture I had only ever seen in textbooks suddenly surrounded me, buildings that looked like they had grown out of the earth instead of being constructed. And then there was the Basílica de la Sagrada Familia
.
The Cathedral Made of Light
Inside the Sagrada Familia, I forgot to be guarded.
I am not religious. I left the Catholic Church at eighteen and never looked back. After my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, even the idea of faith felt hollow. The last time I tried to take him to Mass, he refused. When I asked why, he said, “Why would I go worship a God who gave me a disease that makes me forget the people I love most?”
Something in me broke that day, and whatever fragile thread I still had to religion broke with it.
So I expected to admire the cathedral the way you admire a museum piece. Beautiful. Impressive. External.
Instead, it undid me.
The interior felt less like a church and more like stepping into a living forest made of light. Columns rose like enormous trees branching toward a ceiling that looked less built than grown. Stained glass turned the air itself into color, morning on one side, evening on the other, as if the sun were rising and setting inside the building.
I knew the symbolism. Years of CCD classes one night a week had made sure of that. But knowledge had nothing to do with what was happening.
I cried almost immediately.
Not polite tears. Not discreet ones. The kind you can’t stop, because something deeper than your thoughts has decided it’s time.
Some parts filled me with a strange, buoyant peace. Others hit something raw and aching I didn’t even know was still exposed. It felt less like worship and more like standing inside grief and beauty at the same time, with nowhere to hide from either.
I didn’t walk out believing in God.
But I walked out believing in awe again.
And after everything that had happened, that felt like enough.
Italy — The World Opens Wider
As if Spain itself weren’t enough, we decided almost casually to fly to Italy. The ticket cost less than a dinner out back home, one of those absurd European travel moments that makes Americans question everything they thought they knew about distance.
Naples was loud, gritty, and alive in a way that felt completely different from Spain. Mount Vesuvius hovered in the background like a reminder that beauty and destruction can occupy the same skyline. The streets smelled like espresso, salt air, and pizza so good it permanently recalibrated my expectations.
Pompeii was something else entirely. I had taught about it for years, tracing maps and timelines, explaining daily life in a city frozen by catastrophe. Standing there in person, walking the same stone streets, history stopped being abstract. It was intimate, almost intrusive, as if we were guests in someone else’s unfinished day.
And then there was the Amalfi Coast.
We stayed on a mountainside overlooking the sea, where the horizon seemed to go on forever and the water shifted colors depending on the light. Narrow roads clung to cliffs in ways that felt both terrifying and miraculous, connecting towns that looked like they had been poured down the mountains rather than built on them.
Days blurred together in the best possible way. Long meals. Fresh seafood. Gelato that somehow tasted brighter than anything I had eaten before. Shops spilling onto tiny streets. Laundry fluttering from balconies. Everything saturated with color and sun.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t measuring each day by how much it hurt. I was simply living inside it.
Being noticed didn’t hurt, either. Italian men, like Spanish men, seemed delighted by women who looked like me, curves and all. After months of feeling invisible or rejected, that simple acknowledgment felt surprisingly restorative. Not because I needed validation from strangers, but because it reminded me that I still existed in the world as a person who could be seen.
Italy didn’t feel like an escape from Spain. It felt like proof that my world was expanding again.
Standing on those cliffs above the sea, I remember thinking that the horizon looked impossibly far away, as if the world had suddenly stretched open after feeling so small for so long. Nothing in my life was magically fixed. The past hadn’t been erased, and the future was still uncertain. But for the first time, I could imagine a life that was bigger than what had happened to me. Spain didn’t solve my problems or rewrite my story. It gave me something quieter and, in many ways, more powerful: the sense that joy, beauty, and possibility still existed, and that I might someday belong to them again.