IF YOU DRIVE ALONG THE SOUTHERN COAST OF PORTUGAL, THE FABLED Algarve region, just before you reach land’s end at the westernmost tip of continental Europe, you’ll pass the small town of Salema. Salema is a seaside village with around two hundred fifty local residents, many of them fishermen and their families. Life here is slow and unhurried, intimately connected with the sea and the past. Men still launch colorful wooden boats off the beach and hunt octopus in the morning. Women still beat their laundry in the bathtub and hang it out to dry beside a stretched moray eel carcass or two. The only road through town is called Rua Pescadores (Fishermen’s Street), and it is crowded with simple homes joined at the edges, wasting no space, lined up along a sloping hillside like barnacles clinging to a rock. Walk along the cobblestones of this street and you’ll find that all the alleyways dead-end at the boundless Atlantic while the surf provides a heartbeat, an easy rhythm, to your steps.
We first discovered Salema in 2000, after the death of Traca’s father and the murder of my best friend. Back then we were looking for healing, and we could not have chosen a better spot. Salema means “peace” in Arabic, and that’s exactly what we found.
Ten years later, it was summer—August—as we drifted back into town, and we knew exactly what to do. We walked familiar hillsides, through fields of rosemary and wild fennel, past ripening fig and almond trees, eventually ending up at our favorite private coves. These small slips of beach were surrounded by jagged cliffs and could be accessed only by steep paths that required a mountain goat’s agility. But once on the sand, we were treated to complete seclusion, with nothing on the agenda but swimming, lounging, and soaking up the boundless Algarve sun.
There was no volunteering in Portugal. That part of the trip was done. We were just four more tourists on vacation. We even started spending some time apart, which I know our kids were ready for.
As a bonus, Logan and Jackson reconnected with their childhood friend Yolanda, who still lived in the village. Yolanda was the first friend Logan made at Salema’s tiny public school back when he was seven.
The Escola Primária is a one-room schoolhouse that sits on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. It houses grades one through six and had eighteen students back when Logan attended. I walked him to school for his first day and we got there a little early; the door was locked and there was no teacher in sight. On the playground, which was really just a dusty expanse around the school building, not a single word of English was being spoken. While Logan clutched my hand with his sweaty little fingers, the other kids were going crazy, chasing each other, shouting as if they were all furious. It was typical Portuguese kid behavior.
There are very few rules for kids in Portugal; parents seem happy to let them run wild in most every social situation. I remember going out to dinner with Traca one night back then, and some local children were screaming in the restaurant’s dining room, racing between the tables playing hide-and-seek. (I think the Portuguese call it hide-and-shriek … or maybe that’s just what they do.) As we ate, surrounded by escalating noise and occasional sprinting, no parents spoke up and tried to calm the game down. I even had one child choose the space under my chair as his hiding spot. When I checked, I found him glancing up at me conspiratorially with his finger to his lips.
But that first morning as I stood with Logan outside his new school, watching the dervish of intense kid play swirl around us, one small imp of a Portuguese girl came up to Logan, casually looked him up and down, and then did just the right thing:
“Hello,” she said in perfect English before running off.
Logan exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath, then looked up at me with a huge smile and a Can you believe that? look on his face. And everything worked out fine.
She’s all grown up now, a tall and beautiful (but still impy) young woman, and she met Logan and Jackson at the beach most days, then took them into town at night. It was surprisingly fun to watch. For the first time in their young lives, our kids were actually going out, leaving the condo at 10:30 P.M. and hitting the local clubs. The drinking age in Portugal is eighteen, but it’s really nonexistent. I swear there were two twelve-year-old boys standing next to me at a bar one night, buying beers like old-timers. While our kids weren’t drinking like Portuguese seventh graders just yet, they did admit to ordering their first drinks, and they were clearly loving their newfound freedom after so much intense family time.
So with the kids off boozing and partying and tanning the days away, Traca and I were free to simply be. We’d grab some snacks—native clementines, local cheese, fresh bread—and walk off into the countryside alone. We laughed a lot. We talked for hours. We kissed on our beach blankets. We tried to tread water while holding each other close. Life was easy.
One afternoon, after having my fill of sun, I kissed Traca and retreated toward a rock ledge for a little reading in the shade. Stepping back, I found a mosaic heart that someone had created out of shells and left in the sand. Mosaic always reminds me of Salema. Traca learned the art of mosaic tiling from an eccentric German woman named Brigitte on our first visit, and many whimsical bathroom walls and colorful kitchen backsplashes attest to this fact back in Maine. But the heart I found on the sand was more than just a reminder of Traca’s penchant for smashing perfectly good square tiles and fastening the broken pieces to flat surfaces. In fact, it looked to me like the ideal symbol for our relationship at that moment. One half was white, one half was deep blue, like the yin and yang symbol in which two opposites come together to form a whole. It was all fragments, dead bits from the past, from two completely different species. White clam shells, dark blue mussel shells, working together to create—however temporarily—something beautiful, something fragile, some approximation of true love.
On our last night in Salema, we all went into town together for what promised to be a party: The International Festival of the Accordion had come to Salema! On the boardwalk behind Fishermen’s Street, the whole village had turned up, strings of lights were lit, food stalls were open, dancing was encouraged, all in celebration of that magical squeeze box with keys and buttons that the polka had made famous. We started the evening off with a family dinner that I hoped would be some kind of wrap-up meal, a chance to look back on our trip … but the kids weren’t into it.
“Didn’t we already kind of do this the other night?” Jackson asked, annoyed. “Can we just go?”
Logan wanted to split as well, and they wolfed their food down as soon as it arrived, disappearing five minutes later into the accordion-filled night.
Despite the failed stroll down memory lane, the evening was actually pretty fun. After dinner, Traca and I made our way into the party and found familiar faces all around. Yolanda’s mother, Amanda, our onetime language coach … Phil and Sue, expats from Britain, still living in town … even Brigitte, the German artist who had taught Traca to do mosaic, was there. Brigitte used to be a big-time artist in Germany back in the day, but she got tired of that scene. So she moved to Salema, got a place in the country, and does mosaic for hire around town. Now in her fifties, she seemed a bit weary behind her thin, regal demeanor, and she was philosophical about love. Relationships had never worked out for her; she’d had a string of disappointments, so she was content to live alone with her dog. But for Traca and me … she was hopeful.
“Okay. No couples ah pafict, and blah blah blah,” she told me in her German accent that always makes me smile. “But if you get sumsing grounded and real … man, you need to hold on to ziss. Ja?”
I said ja. We both looked at Traca, who was laughing out on the dance floor, lit by party lights and surrounded by accordion music. She looked beautiful, and Brigitte approved.
“Men cannot handle zee woman unbounded, ja?” She looked me in the eye to be sure I understood. “But if you stand wiss her and all zat shit. Wow! Ziss is really sumsing.” Then she smiled and nodded. “Don’t give up,” she encouraged.
“We’re working on it,” I said.
It was time to go home.