fleas

My mother decided to refresh her grasp of Amharic, the national language of Ethiopian. (She spent four years there with the Peace Corps, 30 years ago......an option I am also pondering.) Brow furrowed, she now sits at the table, Amharic phrasebook in hand, muttering to herself, "feres....ampol...shamah...." She spits out exploded clicks and "t's", sounds I can't reproduce."This book is for tourists. They don't have the word for flea!!"
I think back to the hostel in Helsinki and hear again dry whispery scratching in the night. In the morning the girl in the bed across the room showed me red dots sprinkled up her arm and onto her back. "Do you think they could be mosquito bites?" she asked.
"At the end of October? In Finland?" I replied. She'd lodged in a grungy hostel in Amsterdam two days earlier. Those were definitely flea bites.
"Did you get fleas?" I ask mom.
"Only at one hotel I stayed at. I told the manager and they scrubbed the floor with kerosene. The kerosene smell was worse than the fleas!"
Fleas and kerosene fumes, diseases from bad water, missed trains, late planes, lost passports and broken down buses. The hazards of travel are many and most of you know this better than I do. Yet the rewards are even greater. I've hung up my backpack and stowed my passport in a drawer for the next few months. I'm sitting here staring out the window at the snow thinking about how big the world is and the itchy pangs of wanderlust still stir my soul. I'm thinking of all the places you all will be this year--Belize, England, Canada, California, Minot, St. Cloud. I'm looking forward to learning of your adventures and hoping I have a few of my own. Wherever you are and wherever you travel this year, may your water be clean, may the natives be friendly, and may all your beds be free of fleas!