We were driving to Puerto Vallarta for a short vacation last week when my daughter turned around from the front seat and pointed out palm trees to my grandsons. 

“This means we’re getting close to the ocean,” she said, “because palm trees only grow near water.”

Once again, I had found myself in the back seat, squeezed between car seats that held a two-year-old and a four-year-old who tended to drip juice and drop oreos on my white shorts. 

My right leg was asleep, my left hand was sticky from the unfinished sucker that had been handed to me, and I was not suffering fools gladly. 

“Alex,” I said to my daughter rather petulantly, “that’s not true. We have palm trees right in our neighborhood.”

“We do?” she asked. 

Indeed, we do. Several of our neighbors have them in their front yards. The street that circles the outer rim of our neighborhood is lined with them. Fronds from our back yard neighbors can be seen from our patio.

To give my daughter her due, none of the palms in our neighborhood are coconut palms, which she might have been right about. But I don’t think that the palms that she noticed on our drive were coconut palms either.

What I think is that we all stop noticing the things that we see every day.

There’s a beautiful tree with bright orange flowers on one of the side streets that I take to get to my grandson’s preschool. When I first got to Mexico, I couldn’t walk by that tree without stopping and marveling at it. I took pictures, picked up the flowers that had fallen to the ground, and turned around for one last look when I got to the end of the street. 

Lately, I’ve found myself walking right past.

It’s the same with the manicured trees that so intrigued me when I first arrived. I’m still aware of them, but they’ve become a part of my background. 

I walk to the market every Friday. It’s a straight walk, down one street and across the railroad tracks and I’m there. An auto-pilot type of walk. 

Except that a few weeks ago, I somehow ended up on the other side of the street on my walk home. A difference of just six lanes of traffic, but one that gave me a whole new perspective.  

Because, suddenly, I found myself noticing things. Ornate cupolas on the other side of the street that were too high to see from my normal path. A little grocery that I had never entered or noticed. A fish market and taco stands that I had yet to try. A side street where I saw a tree with bright pink flowers that looked like cheerleading pom poms. 

I turned the corner to get a closer look. 

It doesn’t always take a drive out of town to open our eyes to the palms back home. Sometimes it just takes crossing the street.