Eat, Pray, Love

for the summer, so I slide into her home, replacing her in this miraculous space. There is a
bright red kitchen here, a pond full of goldfish, a marble terrace, an outdoor shower tiled in
shiny mosaics; while I shampoo I can watch the herons nesting in the palm trees. Little secret
paths lead through a truly enchanting garden. The place comes with a gardener, so all I have
to do is look at the flowers. I don’t know what any of these extraordinary equatorial flowers are
called, so I make up names for them. And why not? It’s my Eden, is it not? Soon I’ve given all
the plants around here new monikers—daffodil tree, cabbage-palm, prom-dress weed, spiral
show-off, tip-toe blossom, melancholy-vine and a spectacular pink orchid I have christened
“Baby’s First Handshake.” The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around
here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bed-
room window. There’s a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for the half
hour every day before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time like he’s having Viet-
nam War flashbacks. Oddly, I don’t mind this. I don’t mind anything these days. I can’t ima-
gine or remember discontent.
The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there’s a cricket or-
chestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how mis-
understood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool
it is to be roosters.(“We are ROOSTERS!” they holler. “We are the only ones who get to be
ROOSTERS!”) Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical birdsong competition, and it’s
always a ten-way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the place quiets down
and the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will
disappear into the foliage completely and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower
myself. The rent is less than what I used to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month.
The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a
walled garden.”
Eat, Pray, Love