“Snails,” Nick explains.
We keep walking, and vibrant oranges and limes line the walls, waiting in stacked crates to be sold. A butcher displays skinned lamb carcasses hanging in his window. Young men doze on piles of rugs, and an old man chips away stone with a chisel, carving something written in Arabic. Smells waft around us, swirling through the air: cigarette smoke, roasting chestnuts, piles of paprika, raw fish. Upstairs, old women hang laundry, stretched across to their neighbors’ windowsill, while children ride plastic tricycles around potted plants on balconies. Travel writer Nigel Tisdall called this medina in Fez “the original live/work neighborhood.”1
We maze through narrow streets, turning right, left, right again, each one the same dusty caramel color and packed with shops and cafés.
“Do you ever get lost?” Kyle asks Nick.
“All the time,” he replies.
Tate slips next to me and says, “This reminds me of Turkey.” I give her a knowing smile and nod. There are startling similarities between this and the archaic, still-standing pazars in our former residence. We’ll be there in two months, and walking through this Moroccan medina whets my appetite, makes me strangely homesick.
We turn a corner, and Nick leads us to a narrow restaurant, asks a waiter if we can sit on the top floor. We climb up a cramped spiral staircase so dark I debate using my phone’s flashlight app, and when we reach the top, the sun sprays through walls of windows and bores into our eyes. We take a seat at a table long enough to seat nine. Rooftops of the medina splay before us, reds and ochres; pointed minarets pierce the blanket of lower-level apartments and shops. Nick and Erin order a spread of food, and we sip mint tea from tulip glasses while we wait. The warm liquid travels through my limbs. Morocco is cold.
Rather abruptly, the sky darkens and the sun tucks behind clouds. Gusts of wind begin to clang windows and shutters surrounding us, and at a window facing ours, a woman hastily gathers her drying laundry and bolts the shutters closed. Our windowpanes rattle and clang against their frames. Kyle and Nick try to seal shut open windows, but they’re delicate, breakable antiques. We watch them knock against the wind.
We agree to second rounds of tea, and Tate reads a book while the four boys chase one another around the terrace.
“Do you come here often to eat?” Kyle asks, admiring with his fingers the walls plastered in blue-and-green painted tile. “I would.”
“No, but we should,” Erin answers. “This is some of the best comfort food in the world. You’ll see.”
Soon, waiters emerge from the narrow stairway with arms covered in tagines, Moroccan earthenware pots with cone-shaped dome covers. They’re set in the center of the table and the waiters lift the lids. Steam wafts in our faces, and I breathe in the scent of Sunday afternoon. Chicken, beef, and lamb bubble in cumin-infused sauce next to carrots and onions, and next to them towers of flatbread totter high on plates. Julienned potatoes, fried, bob and bubble in a red sauce.
“This smells exactly like pot roast,” I say.
“It tastes like pot roast,” Erin says, eyes hungry. “Dig in.”
We fork chunks of meat and potatoes, scoop carrots onto the plates in front of us, and drown rounds of flatbread in the red sauce. Our kids devour their plates and hungrily ask for seconds. The fall-apart meat and succulent carrots taste like relief, like home; I want to swim in the sauce, submerge my face and breathe in. This rooftop in Fez smells like a fall childhood day in Texas.
We toast another round of mint tea after we eat, when the startling sound of breaking glass pierces our ears and wakes us from our food coma. A delicate terrace window has succumbed to shattering, leaving a wake of glass shards scattered on the balcony. Full-force gusts of wind bellow through, hint at more destruction on the horizon. We pay to remove our offspring from the crime scene and give our hearty thanks to the chef.
Bellies full and the wind much calmer on the ground, we stroll slowly again through the Medina labyrinth, eyeing oysters piled high on carts, more roasted chestnuts, more leather bags, more metal trinkets. Another butcher displays a camel head in his window. Carpet salesmen try to entice us with more mint tea. A muezzin beckons followers with a call to prayer, competing with the roar of scooters squeezing past our entourage. Nick and Erin lead us to their favorite art shop, and we bargain for watercolor scenes of Morocco, a cheaper alternative to the renowned rugs.
Tate whispers in my ear as I flip through paintings, “Can I pick out a painting for my room?” Along with her scroll from Xi’an, she’s also collected a batik print from Kenya. I go ahead and nod, bending our souvenir rule.
“Wherever my room will be,” Tate explains, “I want it to look like this year.”
Tonight after the kids go to sleep, we toast manhattans in Nick and Erin’s living room and watch Saturday Night Live reruns. We laugh at actors who remind us of college friends and reminisce about late-night drives through Austin streets.
“Remember when Corey and John and all those guys showed up to Kerbey Lane wearing random clothes they found in Jeff’s mom’s closet?” A fond college memory of mine, since I was there working my waitress shift and feigning acquaintance with friends who’d arrived in embarrassing flowered dresses and white blazers.
“Or on that train in England, when the drunk guy sang ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ when he heard we’re from Texas?” Erin adds. I had completely forgotten that one.
“How about all those nights in your apartment rewinding the kissing scene in that Drew Barrymore movie with Michael Vartan?”
Kyle chimes in. “Remember when Nick picked me up so I could surprise you with the news that I’d moved to Austin?” I stop and remember. His move to my city after our time in Kosovo signified serious commitment. My heart flutters with this memory. I love that we’re in the Moroccan apartment of friends who played a part in that. These people are an extension of family.
Whenever I leave a place and move on to a new one, I carry a peculiar loyalty about where I once was. Ethiopia was a challenge, but when we arrived in Morocco and Nick and Erin asked about it, we could only sing its praises, as though it needed our defense. I think back to Sri Lanka, and the whirling-dervish monkeys no longer agitate me in my memories like they did when I was standing in that park next to them. I even brush off China’s pollution with a shrug, now that I’m months past breathing it in.