The Girl From Ipanema

The Girl from Ipanema

When I began building this website and arrived at the blog section, I saw the image of coconut trees with the words Girl from Ipanema. Instantly, I was transported back to the days when that song first came out, when everyone knew the story—the romance between the singer, her husband, and the American jazz musician who traveled there, stirred up excitement, and helped make her a star. Eventually, as the story went, he carried her off to the United States, where she became a star in her own right.

But what has always amazed me most about that song—the words and that unforgettable tune that hums in your head every time you hear it—is the feeling it carries. The beach. The sand between your toes. The wrap tied at your hips. The slow walk across the shore. As you lift each leg and move it forward, your foot feels as though it is wading through honey. When it touches the sand, a love relationship begins—each grain coursing between your toes, flowing around your foot, rising into your calves, then falling back again to the ground. It is not just a walk. It is a silent, effortless dance.

If you have never lived in the Caribbean, this is what you may sense but never fully touch.

If you are Caribbean, Brazilian, or South American—if you are truly a sand girl—you know this feeling in a way that visitors never can. You know the sun intimately, in the only way tropical people can know it. You understand the sensual warmth of the hot sun no matter the heat—the sun on your arms and chest, on your legs, in every curve and hollow of your body. You don’t visit the sun. You live with it. It lives with you.

That is what I always believed the girl from Ipanema felt as she walked across the sand.Because that is what I always felt when I walked across the sand.

There is something special for me about being Caribbean. It ties into a connection to the earth that is as real as real. When you are born in the Caribbean, the first thing you see as your eyes open is the coconut tree. And when you go to school, you learn to write by learning to draw the coconut tree. It is the first mark you make on paper, the first thing you are taught to draw, and each month and year it grows into the leafy, languid being that slowly tells you which way the breeze is blowing. This is the identity you have with the earth, the wind, and the hot sky.

Tourists come to the beach searching for escape. We come carrying our lives with us. They lie beneath the sun; we grow beneath it. They photograph the sea; we measure our days by its moods.

The girl from Ipanema kept walking. So did I.

The sand did not release all of its secrets at once.

And this is only one of the memories the sand has kept for me.