you find yourself riding a tricycle. Every. Day. Because you should never do anything in the presence of a toddler unless you are willing to do it over and over and over. And over.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Me llamo Teresa.
I always liked my name, growing up, because I was the only Teresa I knew. I felt sorry for the dime-a-dozen Jessicas and Jennifers and Melissas and Elizabeths, who had to go by first-name-plus-last-initial. Melissa Bee! Jenny Ess! I would have been “Teresa Pee!” so I was grateful to have avoided that.
Now, in our sparsely populated Oaxaca neighborhood, there are two other Teresas—a teenager and a middle aged woman; I fit right into the chronology. The woman who runs our little local store is named Teresa. My husband’s great-grandmother—the oldest person I have met in real life—is named Teresa. The antagonist of a currently popular telenovela is named Teresa (so I’m plagued with people breathily quoting, “Eres mala, Teresa” at me at every turn). We’re a peso a dozen, and I’m okay with that. Having spent so much of my life wanting to be different, to stand out, I’ve ended up in a place where I stand out by default, and work hard at blending in. Having a quintessential Mexican name only helps.
Oddly, a lot of the popular baby names in Mexico right now are names that were popular in the U.S. in the late seventies and early eighties, so my son is the little blue-eyed boy with the old-fashioned Spanish name (people always say, “My great-grandfather was named Isaias!”), surrounded by brown-eyed kids named Rebecca and Alison and Elizabeth and Alexander.
Anyway, it’s strange how things come around. In a different country and thirty-some years later, another wave of Jennifer Arrs and Melissa Els--that is, Jennifer Err-ay and Melissa El-ay. The name that I once appreciated for its difference, I now appreciate for its sameness.
And the one thing I didn’t used to like about my name was the supposed meaning: “helper at the harvest.” Lame, I thought, because my friends would go around saying how their names meant “beloved of God” or “beautiful flower” or “of noble birth.” Now I’m all about the idea of being a helper at the harvest, both literally and metaphorically. I can only hope that the abundance of adult Teresas running around Mexico means we’re due for a massive harvest that will require lots of helpers. A bumper crop of something wonderful for Alison Oh and Rebecca El-ay and Alexander Ah, and Isaias.
Now, in our sparsely populated Oaxaca neighborhood, there are two other Teresas—a teenager and a middle aged woman; I fit right into the chronology. The woman who runs our little local store is named Teresa. My husband’s great-grandmother—the oldest person I have met in real life—is named Teresa. The antagonist of a currently popular telenovela is named Teresa (so I’m plagued with people breathily quoting, “Eres mala, Teresa” at me at every turn). We’re a peso a dozen, and I’m okay with that. Having spent so much of my life wanting to be different, to stand out, I’ve ended up in a place where I stand out by default, and work hard at blending in. Having a quintessential Mexican name only helps.
Oddly, a lot of the popular baby names in Mexico right now are names that were popular in the U.S. in the late seventies and early eighties, so my son is the little blue-eyed boy with the old-fashioned Spanish name (people always say, “My great-grandfather was named Isaias!”), surrounded by brown-eyed kids named Rebecca and Alison and Elizabeth and Alexander.
Anyway, it’s strange how things come around. In a different country and thirty-some years later, another wave of Jennifer Arrs and Melissa Els--that is, Jennifer Err-ay and Melissa El-ay. The name that I once appreciated for its difference, I now appreciate for its sameness.
And the one thing I didn’t used to like about my name was the supposed meaning: “helper at the harvest.” Lame, I thought, because my friends would go around saying how their names meant “beloved of God” or “beautiful flower” or “of noble birth.” Now I’m all about the idea of being a helper at the harvest, both literally and metaphorically. I can only hope that the abundance of adult Teresas running around Mexico means we’re due for a massive harvest that will require lots of helpers. A bumper crop of something wonderful for Alison Oh and Rebecca El-ay and Alexander Ah, and Isaias.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Everything.
At the neighbors’ house, a sheet is draped over the window frame in lieu of glass. A dense constellation of tiny holes in the tin roof pierces the dimness inside with needles of bright afternoon light. The floor is packed dirt.
There’s a huge, creepy Christ Child doll in a white nightgown balanced on a corner shelf, and on the back wall, an uneven line of baby photos. (A long line—Doña Blanca has six kids. She can’t be much older than I am, and you can see that she was once a pretty young woman, but she looks about fifty, and worn out; her husband looks about twenty and works when he feels like it).
The youngest of the six, Edwin and Jesus and Darian, are jumping on their bed and laughing; Isaias is laughing and trying to jump, he’s almost got it figured out. I wonder how long it will take before he figures out the differences between this house and ours, and what he'll make of them.
The first time the kids came over to our house, they looked around wide-eyed, and Edwin said, “Your house is really nice, and you have EVERYTHING.” We don’t have a couch, my desk is a piece of sheetrock atop some wooden fruit crates, our floor is brick over sand, our kitchen table and chairs are of the hideous plastic variety (complete with beer logos), there’s no running water in the kitchen, no hot water anywhere unless you heat it one the stove. And so on. Mostly, I'm able to keep it in perspective.
Ibis had a job offer this week. Had he accepted it, he’d be making three times what he’s making now. But we’d never see him: six days a week, he would be in a town four hours away. He didn’t take it. We’ll survive with makeshift furniture, together.
My teaching job ends next week, until August. June and July will be tricky—but we’ll have the garden, and the chickens. There’ll be omelets, and salads, and fresh salsa. If it comes down to it, we can eat the rooster. (God, it feels wonderfully Laura Ingalls Wilder to say that: “Don’t worry, Pa. There’re the chickens,” she said stoutly. “By Jove, you’re right, Half Pint. And the garden!”)
There’ll be enough left over to invite Jesus and Edwin and Dari for lunch now and then.
We have everything.
There’s a huge, creepy Christ Child doll in a white nightgown balanced on a corner shelf, and on the back wall, an uneven line of baby photos. (A long line—Doña Blanca has six kids. She can’t be much older than I am, and you can see that she was once a pretty young woman, but she looks about fifty, and worn out; her husband looks about twenty and works when he feels like it).
The youngest of the six, Edwin and Jesus and Darian, are jumping on their bed and laughing; Isaias is laughing and trying to jump, he’s almost got it figured out. I wonder how long it will take before he figures out the differences between this house and ours, and what he'll make of them.
The first time the kids came over to our house, they looked around wide-eyed, and Edwin said, “Your house is really nice, and you have EVERYTHING.” We don’t have a couch, my desk is a piece of sheetrock atop some wooden fruit crates, our floor is brick over sand, our kitchen table and chairs are of the hideous plastic variety (complete with beer logos), there’s no running water in the kitchen, no hot water anywhere unless you heat it one the stove. And so on. Mostly, I'm able to keep it in perspective.
Ibis had a job offer this week. Had he accepted it, he’d be making three times what he’s making now. But we’d never see him: six days a week, he would be in a town four hours away. He didn’t take it. We’ll survive with makeshift furniture, together.
My teaching job ends next week, until August. June and July will be tricky—but we’ll have the garden, and the chickens. There’ll be omelets, and salads, and fresh salsa. If it comes down to it, we can eat the rooster. (God, it feels wonderfully Laura Ingalls Wilder to say that: “Don’t worry, Pa. There’re the chickens,” she said stoutly. “By Jove, you’re right, Half Pint. And the garden!”)
There’ll be enough left over to invite Jesus and Edwin and Dari for lunch now and then.
We have everything.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Notes on my first decade with Mexico.
Year One
My first conscious act upon arriving in the Mexico City airport for the first time is to lock myself in a bathroom stall and cry.
I am twenty, a college sophomore on a study abroad trip, wearing a Grateful Dead shirt and Birkenstocks and a green bandana over my hair. And the idea of not seeing my boyfriend for three whole months terrifies me. I honestly think I won’t make it.
I finish crying and return to the gate, where I pretend to be asleep until we get on our flight to Merida. Later, I’ll remember nothing of the flight. What I will remember is stepping off the plane into the night of another country. The heat, and a smell of…differentness, of who-knows-what, of possibilities, of something-as-yet-unimaginable. I breathe deep and whatever it-is-rushes into my nose and lungs and heart.
Year Two
One year ago, I was writing in my journal “Hasta la vista, Mexico!” and counting the minutes until I could go home. Already I’m back, this time with my brother in tow. We step out of the airport into a gray Mexico City afternoon, and I crow, “It smells like Mexico!”
My brother, four years younger and infinitely more practical, says, “All cities smell like this.” But that can’t be true.
We go to Pachuca, because the guidebooks make it sound cool. It’s really not, and I spend the entire first night hyperventilating and missing my boyfriend.
But the next morning, I’m up early and walk alone down a busy street that I will one day come to know well. The sun is just coming over the hills and rooftops: that soft, lemony light, with an edge of diesel exhaust. The high-heeled, sticky-haired office workers, the hunched old ladies in their embroidered gingham aprons, the strutting teenagers in school uniforms, the little girls in shiny patent leather shoes, and me.
Year Three
My life is a mess, so I buy a bikini, take a week off from being a nanny and cheating girlfriend, and meet my friend Joanne in Cancun. Cancun-whoo-hoo-spring-break isn’t the point; Mexico is. We spend the first night in a hostel and take the first morning bus to Tulum.
On the second day we decide to search for a cenote: where the underground rivers that flow beneath the thin limestone shelf of the peninsula rise to the surface. We’d read about one—you were supposed to be able to take a bus, but there aren’t any buses running.
I stop a woman on the street and ask for directions. A shy toddler peeks at us from behind her legs. She explains how to get a taxi to the cenote, and how much we should be charged. I tell her, “Gracias, muy amable”—thank you, very nice of you—and feel crazed with happiness: that I tossed off that “muy amable” like, I think, a native speaker, that we’ve understood each other, that this Mexican woman and I are smiling at each other. I wish I could follow her home.
Later, I dangle my feet in the clear water of the cenote as Joanne swims around the dark edges where the water fades into shadow. Tiny ghost-colored fish nibble at my toes and I’m glad that, even though I have to go back and do something about my life, some tiny part of me will stay swimming here.
Year Four
I’ve just spent a month in Oaxaca, drunk on Mexico: unable to sleep night after night because, ohmygod tomorrow when I wake up I get to be in Mexico! Bad things happened to me during that month, but they slid right off. Especially because every other night there was a call for me: this guy—this man—I met on the bus from Mexico City. He took me to his cousin’s wedding. He didn’t kiss me, and I was both glad and sad about that. He went back to Pachuca. He kept calling. Invited me to visit him.
So here I am, in his little turquoise rental house Pachuca—the city the guidebooks tricked my brother and I into visiting a couple years ago. It’s late, I’ve been on a bus all day. Out the window, the sparkle of street lamps all the way down into the valley. I sit in his one chair and we make happy, awkward conversation. He shows me to the bed, careful to point out the blankets he’s folded on the floor for himself.
The next night, and the night after that, we share the bed. And then I have to leave.
I’ll be back, a few months later, convinced that it’s The Last Time, that It Can’t Work, I’m Just Here to Say Goodbye. When we visit Ibis’s parents on the Oaxaca coast, I’ll stand looking at the reflection of the moon in the water tank and telling myself that I can never belong here, even as I long to. I’ll try as hard as I can not to fall in love too much, and fail. I’ll leave anyway, and immediately regret it.
Year Five
I stay away.
Sometimes, though, at night, I run through it: the flight to Mexico City, the trek through the airport to the bus terminal, the Estrella Blanca bus to Pachuca, the taxi from the bus station to downtown, the bus up the hill to La Reforma, the walk up past the playing fields, a left, a sharp right on the little rutted dirt path, and then I’d be there: the funny little turquoise house where Ibis still lives.
“I could,” I think, clutching the Virgin of Guadalupe pendant I wear to remind me. “I could get there. I could still go.”
I almost go, once. I even buy a plane ticket, but I don’t use it. I don’t go, but I don’t forget, either.
Year Six
It’s been a long time. More than a year. I’m a little stunned that Ibis is still single, that he even wanted to see me after all this time--though we’d never lost touch.
Now I’m up on the roof of the turquoise house with a blanket, trying to sleep off my cold, letting the sun soak into my bones. Ibis is working. I drift in and out of sleep, listening to roosters crow, ranchero music swing, the gas truck blast its scratchy “Gas Im-per-i-al,” the neighbor shriek for her daughter: “Baaaaaarrbaaaaaarraaaaaa!” Behind my eyelids, sunbursts and rose petals and stars. This time, I know I’ll be back.
Year Seven
At the beginning of our summer together, on the bus on the way to Salina Cruz to visit his parents, Ibis asked me to marry him. Here at the house where he grew up, in the green hammock, I told him, finally, yes. Now it’s the end of the summer, we’re back in Salina Cruz, it’s raining a warm soaking rain, and I’m curled up on the bed with hideous cramps. But I’m happy through the pain, looking around the bedroom, listening, clutching Ibis’s hand.
The huge wedding portrait of Ibis’s parents—faded, but you can still see how funny and young they look: his father, slightly dazed; his mother, scared and determined. The crucifix, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the watery turquoise walls of the bedroom, the smell of caldo de pollo, the buzz of Ibis’s mother’s sewing machine, the velvet of Pedro Infante’s voice on the radio, the pat of the rain on the roof, Ibis’s hand in mine. I think, “This is how it’s going to be.”
Year Eight
A blizzard of white confetti. Blonde Meghan and black-haired Montserrat throwing rose petals. Even my mom dancing—even my dad dancing. Ibis’s mom crying and cooking and crying and laughing. Ibis’s nephew—our nephew—shrieking for his mamá. Everybody eating and eating and eating.
A couple hours into the party it starts to rain. I hear El Ingeniero Jesus tell my dad, slowly and loudly, “La lluvia. Es. Buena. La lluvia. Es. Vida.” Rain is good. Rain is life.
Joanne and my brother drinking tequila with Ibis’s cousins. My friend Christa dancing with Ibis’s friend Gina. People we don’t even know wishing us well.
Late that night we walk my tipsy cousin up to his hotel room, and then run across the empty Zocalo, laughing. The white skirt of my dress flying. Stars. A man selling roses—“A rose for the bride?” We don’t have any money on us, but it doesn’t matter. There are stars and there are roses, and we see them.
Year Nine
We leave Pachuca for good and move in to our Oaxaca house in July. We paint the outside with the beautiful orange-brown earth of the yard, the inside butter yellow and moss green and the turquoise of the cenote in the Yucatan where I once let tiny fish nibble my toes.
We plant trees and pull up the grass. Against our will, we acquire a puppy, and then he dies and we cry for a week. Then, again against our will, we acquire another one.
I want to get out and double dig the garden and build a chicken coop, but I’m seven months pregnant and it’s unbelievably hot. I do what I can. One day I’m cutting dead leaves from the banana trees and I kill a scorpion with my machete. I’m thrilled by how hardcore that sounds, especially considering that I’m pregnant: “I killed a scorpion with a machete.”
Our baby will be born at home, in September, on the feast day of San Jeronimo, the patron saint of our new town. Later, when we get to know them, our neighbors will say we should have named him Jeronimo. We’ll name him Isaias. He’ll be a native of this place.
Year Ten
Whenever I go to California for a visit, I surprise people by kissing their cheeks in greeting—what always used to startle me, those first years in Mexico, has become reflex. Sometimes my English comes out with a Spanish accent, which I know people think is an affectation, but honestly just happens. Isaias, beginning to talk, says “mamama,” “papapa,” “dog,” “hi,” “adios,” and “muh" for either more or más—we’re not sure which one he’s trying for, but his meaning is clear.
The magic has worn off, a little. For all that I’ve acculturated, sometimes I still feel strange and outside of things—now in an annoyed, shouldn’t-I-be-on-the-inside-by-now kind of way, no longer in the oooh-how-exotic way of those first years. Sometimes Ibis and I argue about such ridiculous things, I’m embarrassed to even give an example.
But then: we’re just sitting at the gas station eating commercial ice cream bars and showing Isaias the trucks. We could be anywhere; it’s such a mundane moment, such a generic location. Later we’ll go home, past fields of corn and beans and alfalfa, Zapotec ruins, casitas de lamina and casitas de adobe, and we’ll water our little trees, collect the eggs, play soccer with the neighbor kids. We’re at the gas station, but we’re here, together, in Mexico.
There’s no one I’d rather be with. There’s no place I’d rather be.
My first conscious act upon arriving in the Mexico City airport for the first time is to lock myself in a bathroom stall and cry.
I am twenty, a college sophomore on a study abroad trip, wearing a Grateful Dead shirt and Birkenstocks and a green bandana over my hair. And the idea of not seeing my boyfriend for three whole months terrifies me. I honestly think I won’t make it.
I finish crying and return to the gate, where I pretend to be asleep until we get on our flight to Merida. Later, I’ll remember nothing of the flight. What I will remember is stepping off the plane into the night of another country. The heat, and a smell of…differentness, of who-knows-what, of possibilities, of something-as-yet-unimaginable. I breathe deep and whatever it-is-rushes into my nose and lungs and heart.
Year Two
One year ago, I was writing in my journal “Hasta la vista, Mexico!” and counting the minutes until I could go home. Already I’m back, this time with my brother in tow. We step out of the airport into a gray Mexico City afternoon, and I crow, “It smells like Mexico!”
My brother, four years younger and infinitely more practical, says, “All cities smell like this.” But that can’t be true.
We go to Pachuca, because the guidebooks make it sound cool. It’s really not, and I spend the entire first night hyperventilating and missing my boyfriend.
But the next morning, I’m up early and walk alone down a busy street that I will one day come to know well. The sun is just coming over the hills and rooftops: that soft, lemony light, with an edge of diesel exhaust. The high-heeled, sticky-haired office workers, the hunched old ladies in their embroidered gingham aprons, the strutting teenagers in school uniforms, the little girls in shiny patent leather shoes, and me.
Year Three
My life is a mess, so I buy a bikini, take a week off from being a nanny and cheating girlfriend, and meet my friend Joanne in Cancun. Cancun-whoo-hoo-spring-break isn’t the point; Mexico is. We spend the first night in a hostel and take the first morning bus to Tulum.
On the second day we decide to search for a cenote: where the underground rivers that flow beneath the thin limestone shelf of the peninsula rise to the surface. We’d read about one—you were supposed to be able to take a bus, but there aren’t any buses running.
I stop a woman on the street and ask for directions. A shy toddler peeks at us from behind her legs. She explains how to get a taxi to the cenote, and how much we should be charged. I tell her, “Gracias, muy amable”—thank you, very nice of you—and feel crazed with happiness: that I tossed off that “muy amable” like, I think, a native speaker, that we’ve understood each other, that this Mexican woman and I are smiling at each other. I wish I could follow her home.
Later, I dangle my feet in the clear water of the cenote as Joanne swims around the dark edges where the water fades into shadow. Tiny ghost-colored fish nibble at my toes and I’m glad that, even though I have to go back and do something about my life, some tiny part of me will stay swimming here.
Year Four
I’ve just spent a month in Oaxaca, drunk on Mexico: unable to sleep night after night because, ohmygod tomorrow when I wake up I get to be in Mexico! Bad things happened to me during that month, but they slid right off. Especially because every other night there was a call for me: this guy—this man—I met on the bus from Mexico City. He took me to his cousin’s wedding. He didn’t kiss me, and I was both glad and sad about that. He went back to Pachuca. He kept calling. Invited me to visit him.
So here I am, in his little turquoise rental house Pachuca—the city the guidebooks tricked my brother and I into visiting a couple years ago. It’s late, I’ve been on a bus all day. Out the window, the sparkle of street lamps all the way down into the valley. I sit in his one chair and we make happy, awkward conversation. He shows me to the bed, careful to point out the blankets he’s folded on the floor for himself.
The next night, and the night after that, we share the bed. And then I have to leave.
I’ll be back, a few months later, convinced that it’s The Last Time, that It Can’t Work, I’m Just Here to Say Goodbye. When we visit Ibis’s parents on the Oaxaca coast, I’ll stand looking at the reflection of the moon in the water tank and telling myself that I can never belong here, even as I long to. I’ll try as hard as I can not to fall in love too much, and fail. I’ll leave anyway, and immediately regret it.
Year Five
I stay away.
Sometimes, though, at night, I run through it: the flight to Mexico City, the trek through the airport to the bus terminal, the Estrella Blanca bus to Pachuca, the taxi from the bus station to downtown, the bus up the hill to La Reforma, the walk up past the playing fields, a left, a sharp right on the little rutted dirt path, and then I’d be there: the funny little turquoise house where Ibis still lives.
“I could,” I think, clutching the Virgin of Guadalupe pendant I wear to remind me. “I could get there. I could still go.”
I almost go, once. I even buy a plane ticket, but I don’t use it. I don’t go, but I don’t forget, either.
Year Six
It’s been a long time. More than a year. I’m a little stunned that Ibis is still single, that he even wanted to see me after all this time--though we’d never lost touch.
Now I’m up on the roof of the turquoise house with a blanket, trying to sleep off my cold, letting the sun soak into my bones. Ibis is working. I drift in and out of sleep, listening to roosters crow, ranchero music swing, the gas truck blast its scratchy “Gas Im-per-i-al,” the neighbor shriek for her daughter: “Baaaaaarrbaaaaaarraaaaaa!” Behind my eyelids, sunbursts and rose petals and stars. This time, I know I’ll be back.
Year Seven
At the beginning of our summer together, on the bus on the way to Salina Cruz to visit his parents, Ibis asked me to marry him. Here at the house where he grew up, in the green hammock, I told him, finally, yes. Now it’s the end of the summer, we’re back in Salina Cruz, it’s raining a warm soaking rain, and I’m curled up on the bed with hideous cramps. But I’m happy through the pain, looking around the bedroom, listening, clutching Ibis’s hand.
The huge wedding portrait of Ibis’s parents—faded, but you can still see how funny and young they look: his father, slightly dazed; his mother, scared and determined. The crucifix, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the watery turquoise walls of the bedroom, the smell of caldo de pollo, the buzz of Ibis’s mother’s sewing machine, the velvet of Pedro Infante’s voice on the radio, the pat of the rain on the roof, Ibis’s hand in mine. I think, “This is how it’s going to be.”
Year Eight
A blizzard of white confetti. Blonde Meghan and black-haired Montserrat throwing rose petals. Even my mom dancing—even my dad dancing. Ibis’s mom crying and cooking and crying and laughing. Ibis’s nephew—our nephew—shrieking for his mamá. Everybody eating and eating and eating.
A couple hours into the party it starts to rain. I hear El Ingeniero Jesus tell my dad, slowly and loudly, “La lluvia. Es. Buena. La lluvia. Es. Vida.” Rain is good. Rain is life.
Joanne and my brother drinking tequila with Ibis’s cousins. My friend Christa dancing with Ibis’s friend Gina. People we don’t even know wishing us well.
Late that night we walk my tipsy cousin up to his hotel room, and then run across the empty Zocalo, laughing. The white skirt of my dress flying. Stars. A man selling roses—“A rose for the bride?” We don’t have any money on us, but it doesn’t matter. There are stars and there are roses, and we see them.
Year Nine
We leave Pachuca for good and move in to our Oaxaca house in July. We paint the outside with the beautiful orange-brown earth of the yard, the inside butter yellow and moss green and the turquoise of the cenote in the Yucatan where I once let tiny fish nibble my toes.
We plant trees and pull up the grass. Against our will, we acquire a puppy, and then he dies and we cry for a week. Then, again against our will, we acquire another one.
I want to get out and double dig the garden and build a chicken coop, but I’m seven months pregnant and it’s unbelievably hot. I do what I can. One day I’m cutting dead leaves from the banana trees and I kill a scorpion with my machete. I’m thrilled by how hardcore that sounds, especially considering that I’m pregnant: “I killed a scorpion with a machete.”
Our baby will be born at home, in September, on the feast day of San Jeronimo, the patron saint of our new town. Later, when we get to know them, our neighbors will say we should have named him Jeronimo. We’ll name him Isaias. He’ll be a native of this place.
Year Ten
Whenever I go to California for a visit, I surprise people by kissing their cheeks in greeting—what always used to startle me, those first years in Mexico, has become reflex. Sometimes my English comes out with a Spanish accent, which I know people think is an affectation, but honestly just happens. Isaias, beginning to talk, says “mamama,” “papapa,” “dog,” “hi,” “adios,” and “muh" for either more or más—we’re not sure which one he’s trying for, but his meaning is clear.
The magic has worn off, a little. For all that I’ve acculturated, sometimes I still feel strange and outside of things—now in an annoyed, shouldn’t-I-be-on-the-inside-by-now kind of way, no longer in the oooh-how-exotic way of those first years. Sometimes Ibis and I argue about such ridiculous things, I’m embarrassed to even give an example.
But then: we’re just sitting at the gas station eating commercial ice cream bars and showing Isaias the trucks. We could be anywhere; it’s such a mundane moment, such a generic location. Later we’ll go home, past fields of corn and beans and alfalfa, Zapotec ruins, casitas de lamina and casitas de adobe, and we’ll water our little trees, collect the eggs, play soccer with the neighbor kids. We’re at the gas station, but we’re here, together, in Mexico.
There’s no one I’d rather be with. There’s no place I’d rather be.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Dia de Campo
That's one of those moments when I feel like we're totally doing the right thing for him--for all three of us--in living where we live.
That's me feeling a little envious of my own kid, me wanting to be two feet tall and rolling around in the alfalfa.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sometimes.
Sometimes it feels like too much, or not enough: too many things that can go wrong, not enough help.
Last week, the pump stopped working again, and then when the guy came to fix it, he dropped it in the well.
Last night, the ants (not the leaf-cutters, not the huge bitey red ones, not the viciously bitey teeny-tiny don't-see-em-until-they're-biting-the-shit-out-of-your-toes ones, but the red and black ones that don't travel in a proper, antly line, so you can't tell where they're coming from or where they're going) started making a nest in our bed.
I haven't had a coherent thought in about a year.
Ibis hasn't had a weekend in about a year.
Just for instance.
And sometimes I want to give up. Rent. Live someplace with normal ants. And no scorpions. Have time to myself, and municipal water.
And then:
And:
And I get through another day, and can't believe my luck.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Learning to Walk in Oaxaca
Isaias begins walking as we’re helping our friends Herminio and Berta with an activity I’ve never had occasion to learn the word for in English: desgranando maiz, stripping the hard kernels of dried corn off the cobs.
Read the rest at The Traveler's Notebook
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)