“I felt that I would be better off, after the divorce, getting myself in a new environment,” she says. “Moving to a new place would give me a new vision to move on.” So the physician set about healing herself. She moved to an apartment. She made plans to travel, something she’d always enjoyed. “I decided that the fact that I was single wasn’t going to keep me from doing what I wanted to do,” she says.
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fan of Asian architecture, she yearned to see the East again, having spent six weeks in Nepal during a med-school rotation. A family, whose children had been patients, invited her to stay with them in Singapore. She took them up on the offer. From there, she traveled alone to Thailand. She spent a few days in Bangkok, then pressed on to the country town of Chang Mai, where she visited a preserve for elephants that had been abused. “We got to wash elephants in the river,” she says. She signed up for a nighttime bicycle tour. No one else did. Not to be foiled by the two-person minimum, she paid double the $20 ticket price. Her young guide led her on a private tour all over town. He stopped at the local market and explained the different kinds of produce. He took her to Buddhist temples, which glimmered with gold at night. “That felt like Thailand to me,” she says. “I got to see the culture.” She flew to Krabi, home of towering limestone formations, known as karsts, that jut from the South Andaman Sea. Most people go to Phuket to see the karsts. “I didn’t go there,” Lucas says. “I don’t go where other people go.” She rented a longboat with a guide and snorkeled the caves of the karsts. On the way back home, on a layover in Tokyo, she looked at Zillow, the real estate website, on her phone. She searched for one-story homes in the New Garden area, where she’d lived and wanted to stay. She got a hit: a 1962 brick ranch with three bedrooms, a full basement and a carport. She tapped on the pictures. There were only exterior shots — a potential red flag — but she was undeterred. She liked the lines of the house. The brick reminded her of the house she’d just sold. She liked the dogwood tree, which was pictured in bloom, in the backyard. She liked the lake behind the house.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
November 2016
O.Henry 69