A truly magical place

I, maybe not so coincidentally, fell in love with this place the same day I decided to marry my husband. The village is tucked away in the hills with nothing but a lousy dirt road leading up to it. Tariks grandparents had only a mule, also known as their 4 by 4, which they would ride up the river bed to get to the larger of the small villages. The house was in a river valley and built into the banks out of packed dirt. We call Tariks grandfather Bahajj and his grandmother we called Lalla Mamma. Bahajj built the house himself including the driveway that's dug out of the mountain. It had no electricity. The water they used would come straight from the stream that was rerouted to run through the house. Lalla Mamma would make dinner squatting over a camping stove in her unlit kitchen. Everything they ate was immediately fresh, therefore required no refrigeration.

The first time I visited this shangri-la was during the summer when the place was littered with cousins who paraded me around, feeding me fruit, introducing me to their pet porcupines and playing soccer in the dried out part of the river bed. The grapes were in season and Bahajj kept handing me bunches of grapes. I ate so many, I was sick by the time I got home. But I'll never forget the tunnel the grapevines made leading up to the court yard where we played with the cousins and drank tea. It was truly a magical place - one that I've cited several times as my favorite house in the world. I've never seen a place more organic and more serene. It was not ostentatious or over-kept. It had virtually no furniture and the steps leading up to the second floor were carved out of the ground. It was simply a glorious symbol of survival built by a man who lived through the battle of Dien Bien Phu by hiding under a corpse and pretending he was dead for 11 days.

That special day ended with a handful of cousins piling into the car, making the winding journey back to Tariks mothers house. Several of the cousins sat on my lap and once someone started singing, the chorus erupted and they sang traditional Moroccan songs all the way back home. It was in that moment that I decided this was a life I could see myself apart of.