March had a lot riding on it, which is honestly just how March operates. We'd been talking about Europe for years — the kind of well-intentioned plan that keeps getting rescheduled for all the reasonable reasons plans get rescheduled — until my sister's 60th birthday became the unmoveable anchor. Not a suggestion. Not a "we really should." A ticket. This was happening, and I was going to take her to Europe if I had to carry both our bags myself. Spoiler: I did end up carry both our bags after my sister and a bike met the same desitney the the Berlin Wall. She surived with a great story to share, that accompined weeks of recovery.
We flew overnight through Dublin and into Düsseldorf, found our way to Soest, Germany, and checked into Hotel am Wall — a beautiful old stone property that had clearly been waiting several centuries for someone to notice it properly. The jet lag after a transatlantic overnight is its own humbling thing. You watch the sun rise twice in one calendar day and lose any remaining sense of when — or who — you are. You push through it. The reward is standing in a German city older than your entire country and feeling briefly, wonderfully small. A sense of homecoming given our fathers ancestory.
Amsterdam gave us the canal cruise, the Rijksmuseum, and that light on the water that Dutch painters have been failing to fully capture since the 1600s — not for lack of trying, just for lack of it actually being capturable. Brussels gave us cobblestones, a walking tour, chocolate that reframed my entire understanding of chocolate, and a beer tasting that I recall warmly and somewhat selectively. And then Bruges. Bruges was the whole trip. Bruges was the moment I watched my sister walk those medieval streets with her face completely open — her whole heart out — and thought: yes. This is exactly why we planned this. She turned sixty in a city that decided, centuries ago, that beauty alone was a sufficient reason to exist. I find that deeply on-brand for her.
What gave that March trip its real center, though, was not the itinerary so much as the fact that I was getting to share it with my sister at this exact threshold in her life. Turning sixty on another continent gave the whole journey a warmth and seriousness that ordinary tourism never carries. Even the jet lag felt easier to forgive because the reason for it was so clearly worth the trouble. I remember thinking more than once that celebration becomes more precise when it is stretched across time and place instead of compressed into one dinner and a cake.
A World Embraced by Love
In this vast expanse, imagine the place, Where kindness blooms and hate gives chase. Hearts embrace with love profound, Negativity crumbles, losing ground.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →Traveling like that also reminded me how much I value being made small by history. Europe gave us old stone, canal light, trains, museums, and cities that had no interest in making me feel culturally central. I loved that. The older I get, the more grateful I am for experiences that correct the scale of my own life without diminishing it. March 2024 did that beautifully. It let family, beauty, and history all work on me at once, and I came home richer for the combination.
What I still carry most vividly from that trip is not just the cities, though the cities were extraordinary. It is the way celebration felt enlarged by context. A sixtieth birthday at home would have been lovely. A sixtieth birthday in Bruges, with canal water holding the late light and old stone making beauty feel like civic policy, became something else entirely. It let the milestone breathe at the scale it deserved. That is one of the reasons I trust the memory so much now: it was generous in exactly the way the occasion called for.
It also reminded me how much family joy matters when it is made concrete. Not implied, not postponed, not vaguely promised for later. Ticket bought. Bags packed. Streets walked together. Chocolate shared. Laughter repeated until it becomes travel's own kind of architecture. March 2024 belongs on the timeline not just because we went, but because going itself was the act of love.
I paired this month with A World Embraced by Love because the trip was not about outrunning grief. It was about celebrating my sister generously and letting old cities, canal light, and family affection enlarge the moment to its proper size. Europe felt warm, shared, and unmistakably loved. The poem needed to tell the truth about that.