Life as a Tumbleweed

"Later you go Baby Temple!" Dy, our driver, said as he dropped us off at the hotel. The eager smile in his Cambodian lilt was unmistakable.

Four days he had been driving for us. Mostly we just saw the back of his head from our seats in the shade of his tuktuk, as he braved the May sun with only a helmet and a pair of sunglasses. Dy always had a smile though. He smiled as he stretched his limbs after hours on his motorcycle, or while telling us a historical tidbit. He even smiled every time he handed us water bottles from his stash.

But hearing the smile in his voice was something else. Of all the grand temples he brought us to, it was clearly this one he was most excited about. And in a sense, so was I.

He picked us up that afternoon and began our journey to Baby Temple - our last stop before leaving Siem Reap that night. He drove into the maze of city streets. Tourists thinned, avenues narrowed, commercial establishments came less and less, and houses became the main attraction. He entered a small dirt road. Immediately heads turned our way and followed us to where we were going.

Finally, Dy parked beside a cement bungalow. A petite woman stood at the doorway, a baby boy in her arms. He had the roundest brown eyes, his wispy hair standing tall on his head.

"Welcome to Baby Temple!" Dy said, laughing. He introduced his wife, who just gave us warm smiles since she spoke no word of English, and his one-year-old son, who just ogled at the strangers entering his sanctuary.

Inside, Dy's mother asked us, in so many gestures, to make ourselves comfortable while waiting for Dy to finish preparing our dinner. We delighted ourselves with local TV shows we didn't understand and tried to entertain Dy's son by making funny faces, all the while wondering how on earth we deserved this honor.

Baby Temple might not possess the outright grandeur of all the others. It had bare concrete walls and bare concrete floors. It was adorned with two armchairs and a shelf. On paper it had nothing against the towers of Bayon or the halls of Angkor Wat. But in that trip, it was the most special. Because it was alive; it would still continue to grow, and flourish. It still contained warmth and love. It was the most special because it was still a baby's temple, a wife's and a mother's temple, because it was Dy's temple. And especially because after all the temples we saw, this was the only one that still had a beating heart.