Sanctuary

MY MOTHER’S childhood could not have been more different from mine. The only daughter of prosperous New York City Jews, she was born in Paris and grew up in an art-filled apartment on the Upper East Side. I was raised in a rural part of Costa Rica, where my free-spirited parents had moved when I was a toddler, seeking a simpler life in a peaceful, beautiful country where they could raise multilingual kids and not have to choose between freelancing and affording health care. They picked Costa Rica because my dad had lived in the capital, San José, for some time in his twenties and still had friends there.

Our small, rustic house, where I lived until I left for college, was on a family compound in San Ramón de Tres Ríos, a mountain town on the outskirts of San José. Our landlord, a dairy farmer, lived next door with his wife and daughters. I liked to roam his lush, sprawling property after I came home from school. My favorite thing to do was visit the calves, which were kept in a special pen by a narrow creek. In the mornings our landlord sometimes brought us jugs of milk still warm from the udder.

On weekdays my younger sibling and I attended an international K–12 school a couple of towns over; funded jointly by the Costa Rican and French governments, the school served a mix of middle-class Costa Ricans and children of French-speaking expats. (I had classmates from Cameroon, Senegal, Québec, Chad, and Belgium as well as France.) At school I spoke mostly French, save for a handful of classes in Spanish; at