Postcards from Early Summer in Porto

A story of healing, friendship, and a little light delusion under the Portuguese sun

There are worse places to be called back to life than Porto in the summer.

I landed in Portugal for a very specific purpose: to care for my friend, to help with her newborn and toddler, to tend to her home, her fridge and her spirit. It’s postpartum doula work: cooked meals, baby snuggles, garden weeding, gentle walks, listening and witnessing. And I would have done it anywhere. If she had been in a bland suburb of an overheated American city, I would’ve shown up with my nursing bras and magnesium lotion just the same.

But she happens to live here, where the Douro River glimmers just beyond her bedroom window, where stone staircases wind down to markets, where her terraced garden offers artichokes, herbs, and a place to sip wine while the kids nap. We set daily goals that look a lot like joy: strolls to the river, long seaside lunches, emotional processing, and hanging the laundry while talking about the fragility of life.

And somewhere in between the nourishing and the remembering and the tending, I’m also a little swept away.

There is something about Europe in the summer that makes me feel like I’m starring in a foreign film. Audrey Tautou in Amélie or Jean Seberg in Breathless. Something where the dialogue is sparse and the lighting is warm and everything I touch has cinematic consequence. Being here allows me to slip into a fantasy space that’s beautiful and delusional in equal measure. It’s grandiose. It’s embarrassing. And it’s wonderful.

I know I’m not alone in this. There are many of us American women walking down cobblestone streets, overdressed for the weather and hoping the barista thinks we’re French. We dream of passing as a local. We long to be perceived as light, cultured and a little mysterious. We drink espresso like it’s our birthright and blush when someone asks us for directions in Portuguese. We pretend our faces are glowing because of the ocean air and not the rosé. And for a brief moment, we believe it.

But what I’ve come to realize on this trip is that the fantasy and the reality can coexist. I can be both the tired mother helping another tired mother and the woman with a scarf tied effortlessly in her hair, strolling toward lunch. I can grieve what almost was my friend’s near-death, the brush of mortality that made me fear I’d never laugh with her again and I can also sit beside her as we slice peaches and joke about how our twenties were fueled by beer, bus tickets, and questionable decisions.

Europe in the summer has always had a certain lightness to it. Maybe it’s the heat bouncing off the stone and rouge-ing my cheeks. Maybe it’s the rotation of coffee and wine. Maybe it’s that carbs just don’t weigh you down the same way they do in the continental U.S.A. But this time, it’s different. It’s not just the season. It’s the tenderness of the return. It’s watching someone come back to life slowly, fully, quietly and being part of that soft and slow unfolding.

This trip isn’t a vacation. It’s not a set piece. It’s a reminder.

That friendships can stretch across oceans and years. That tending to each other is a gift. That serving another is just love made perceptible. That it’s okay to live in a fantasy for a little while, especially when the real world has asked so much of us.

And that sometimes, healing looks like slow walks, small meals, shared silence, and the audacity to believe that joy is still available to us.

Even now. Especially now.