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The last time I saw Myra Anne, she was in the rutted stretch of middle age. A course of inevitable sameness that less surprising people resign themselves to, on the numbers alone.

After all, she was living in the same state where she was born 55 years ago; same city, 34 years; same house on Chestnut Street, 27; same job, 17.

Work dried up, and she was doing temp jobs, getting headaches, downsizing to an apartment, shuttling on weekends to Hilton Head, where her mother was dying a lingering death.

Then one strangely balmy afternoon in late 2005 she called on me, but not with news I was expecting.

"I'm joining the Peace Corps," she said as we stood under the bare oaks at UNCG. "I don't know where I'll be assigned, but I leave next spring."

The next time I saw her was last week at Starbucks on Battleground, home for daughter Lara's wedding. She was tan. She'd gotten younger.

"You know how I got these muscles?" she said, rolling up a sleeve over a bicep. "Laundry. I do my wash in a bucket. I ride my bicycle two miles a day past a fishing community. I eat brown rice and buy vegetables from people who grew them."

Her assignment took her to a place I had to look up. Suriname is a small country above Brazil where they speak Dutch, and mix cultures from Javanese to Creole to Maroon. She does blood pressure screenings, and helped convert a deserted hospital wing for labor and delivery.

It's a total culture clash. In the coastal capital, they drive on the left. But where she spent 15 months in the interior rain forest — a four-hour ride in flat, narrow boats — no roads at all.

The heat makes August in Greensboro feel mild. Sweat runs in your eyes, and it's so humid that a pair of shoes not worn for a day sprouts mold.

Myra Anne slowed down. She breathed in the air and saw things. Scarlet Rode ibis and leatherback turtles. Women in the village pounding out a bread called "kasava," wearing costumes for the national emancipation day called "Keti Koti" — translated as, "cut the chain."

And I guess I've heard these before-and-after stories of midlife reinvention before. A fellow reporter quit the paper to join a mission in Haiti. A Habitat friend taught English in Mongolia, and now Africa. Even the doctor who delivered my two children into the world — and me to the path of minivan-driving dependability — turned 50 and chucked it all to practice in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

But the thing about Myra Anne is that she's always been one to tell the middle part of the story. It's the part where one decides to cut the chain.

The departure point was a Miami hotel, her Peace Corps staging area. A friend dropped off Myra Anne, and three pieces of luggage.

"If I call your cell," Myra Anne told the friend, "you have to promise to come back and get me, no matter how close you are to North Carolina."

She never made the call. And last week, she had already left again when I realized I needed a photo. So her daughter, Lara, who looks like a 28-year-old version of Myra Anne, brought me two: One from the wedding party, but the other, her favorite.

It's from around 1970 outside the dorm at UNCG. Myra Anne, like every biology major, had to pose with a boa constrictor. And there was a time when I wouldn't have recognized the girl in the picture. Now, I realize I've met her. Just last week at Starbucks.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com