Mug Shots

My children's faces, cut down to 2" by 2", with shadows behind their hair, peek out at me from underneath a messy stack of downloaded and printed passport application forms. My old passport is tucked into an envelope that is addressed "National Passport Center Lockbox" along with a check for $67 and a reasonably good 2x2 likeness of my face.

We spent yesterday evening engaged in a comical ritual that involved the white wall of our house's entryway, a digital camera, a floor lamp with its shade removed, one squirmy seven-year-old with flattened hair, and a nine-year-old with a tendency towards plastic Cheshire cat grins and an impatient husband taking the pictures.

We are getting out of the country this year, or early next year. I just have to get face to face with a coffee plant again. I want to feel those smooth, juicy red berries between my fingers and breathe the humid, thin air that surrounds these tropical, high elevation plantings. I want to feel the fog around my shoulders as we hike. I want to be challenged to figure out how to tell the hotel clerk that the toilet in my room doesn't work, in Spanish.

And this time, I'm bringing my family and as many Phoenixers as possible, although we still have to have someone run the company while we're gone. And coffee fanatic customers would be welcome, too.

I'm thinking Costa Rica.
http://www.coocafe.com/cafe_01_arenal_en.htm
Guacamayo Arenal coffee is cultivated in the Arenal conservation area near the Monteverde Cloud Forest. The Rainforest exhibit at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens is I think modelled after this particular forest and a "scientist's" study of the wildlife there.
Here's some info about the coffee cooperative from TransFair.
http://www.transfairusa.org/pdf/profiles/Coocafe-CostaRica.PDF

Wouldn't that rainforest humidity feel good on your winter-dry skin right about now?