This is the Kos newsletter: warm email notes from a friend. Finding the simple joy in parenthood, bodies, spirituality, creativity, and beauty. Sound like your jam? Subscribe below for weekly notes.
When your friend with the same birthday texts you and says that, for real, you should do something together for your birthday this time, do me a favor? Just say yes. You may end up in a pool like the one pictured above: sprawling blue, 98 degrees, almost empty on a cool night somewhere in Northern California in early June. Heated by a geyser not 100 ft away.
If that same friend sends daily itineraries detailing specific 4 star and up Yelp rated restaurants within walking distance to said pool, also just say yes. You may end up eating chili edamame and shrimp tempura sushi one night, octopus and Basque cheesecake the next. (All divine.)
If she says, should we get on the bikes? Get on the bikes. GET ON THE BIKES! You will ride through a quaint downtown full of antiques and ice cream shops and veer off onto quiet small-town neighborhoods, passing an outdoor dinner party of a local church. Then cruise onto a paved path that meanders through green meadows with rolling mountains in the distance. Then up ahead, wait, what’s that? Vineyards. Miles and miles of vineyards. Oh, and it’s 8:40 PM? Why, the sun is setting to the sound of crickets and it smells like jasmine and fresh dirt and freedom and it’s just the four of you with the wind in your hair, not talking, just riding in content companionable silence.
On the morning I left, I climbed into my mini van in the early hours of Sunday and as I merged onto the highway, felt my mind recalibrating to my life now, in my mini van on my way home to my family, to pack for a long road trip—from my life last night, where I floated in a hot pool sipping icey shrubs asking the most specific questions about my friends lives because there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but be there. Getting into the nitty gritty but with enough brain space and hot tub pool water and drizzly time to really listen and pay attention to the women floating in front of me.
To call it a fun weekend isn’t right. I didn’t know how to talk about it to my husband when I got home. “It was great. It was so good. It was amazing.” But after we all returned home to kids and to do’s, one friend texted: “…it felt like…sacred time almost? There was just something about it.”
Ditto Ditto Ditto.
Now I realize I saw myself again, for the first time in awhile, by seeing my friends.
I spent my childhood summers in that part of the wine country. There’s magic in that water! 🤩 your trip sounds dreamy & wonderful ❤️