This is the sort of morning that fits me like a glove: cool, overcast, perfect for short-sleeve weeding. It's a Nairobi morning, and in my garden this morning, birdsong with black dirt under my fingernails and worm-squirm and distant laughter of children, I could almost smell bread baking at Adam's Arcade.

Adam's Arcade was a short walk away from our first home in Nairobi. We lived in the second-story flat of a large house belonging to an older couple who were on home-leave in the US. Since it would take almost a year for our shipment to arrive from America (due to extensive testing of my mother's dangerous bottle of McCormick Poppyseeds), the flat with its lovely old furniture, dusty puzzles, and enormous, screenless windows was perfect. An elderly British woman lived downstairs in a flowery apartment and she and my mother took tea on a regular basis. There was a large, sunny courtyard where I once took a sketchbook and toiled with my pencils over a sketch of a bicycle wheel. There was a pool but I never remember swimming in it, and there must have been a high gate with a night guard sitting in a little hut.

That was the house in the spreading trees where my mother caught a baboon on our dining room table, eating calmly from the fruit bowl. Baboons are not trustworthy, polite creatures and my mother chased his rubbery bottom all the way down the hallway and back out the window.

Nairobi was younger then. Friends tell me that it takes an hour or more just to drive across the city now. I haven't been back in fifteen years but my memories are as clear as if I left just a month ago. Mostly I remember colors and smells, the sound of my own voice as I opened a window, struck by the beauty of the city--thorny trees, bougainvillea climbing over thick hedges, the jangle of music and the distant roar of downtown traffic. I suppose it was dusty and loud and rather unsafe (almost everyone we knew had been robbed in one way or another), but it was the place of my childhood, and beyond that, it was objectively beautiful in many ways. Why is our culture so monochromatic? In Nairobi, color, color everywhere, on tin cups and matatus and clothes and up walls and in the market.

But today I'm thinking of Adam's Arcade, which we loved for its awkward concrete playground and difficult slide only manageable by squatting and sliding on the soles of your shoes. The bakery smelled different than any bakery I've sniffed since; it was a warm mixture, I suppose, of french bread and samosas and mandazi, mingling with the dust and exhaust of Nairobi. I don't remember many of its offerings beyond the chocolate croissants, which my mother asked for in a French accent since our Canadian friend, who worked for the embassy or the consulate or something important, had once mocked us for sounding American and uncouth. "A loaf of bread and three cwaasant," we ordered, and that's how we still pronounce them today, much to the vigorous mockery of Americans (like my husband), who chide us for being ridiculous.

Today the morning is a grey umbrella, and the air swims with birdsong and spring and the voices of my children on the porch. And I too, just for a few minutes, am a child, lifting my nose to find a rather mediocre bakery I once loved and anticipated as a world-class treat. Sometimes, just before sleeping, I find a place like that deep inside, and I long to stay in that cool place above worry and adulthood just long enough to slip into a dream, and soemtimes, if I'm lucky, I do.

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For a vision of loveliness, as my mother says, see my friend Sal's photos (plus I got a little mention :) at her blog: Sally's Blog