Wow! One of the best things about moving in to a new place is meeting the neighbors, right? Not that you are going to be best friends (actually it is better if you aren't!), but they are the faces that you will often be seeing. This is one of the beautiful faces that we were able to see every day.
A gentle woman, Coo Mu Paw never appeared ruffled, even though she was 8.5 months pregnant and had two little ones to take care of already; and her husband is in the resistance army and wasn't able to come home until a few weeks before the birth of their new one. She lived about three doors down from us, but she often wandered up the path and over the stream to find some edible greens or mushrooms in our "backyard". We would call out hello and grin for the first few weeks. But one day, when I had just finished a week of training and had a day off, she sauntered up to the house with a bunch of bananas and sat down to chat for awhile. Well, chat is an overstatement, but we did our best. I had been learning Karen and she knew a few words of English from her high school days so we entertained each other with what we knew. We actually managed to communicate like that for an hour.
Ever since that day we would occasionally have a neighborly "over the fence" conversation. She would appear, bearing treats of green tree leaves or green bush leaves or purple banana flower wrapped in banana leaf, and I would give her a couple of boxed soy milks for her kids. It was always fun to see her, and to be enveloped in the peace that radiated from her.