A Very Sunday Sunday

1/30/11

Today is what I imagine Sundays should be:

Wake at 7 to do laundry (I can already hear some of you thinking “What? This sounds like a horrible day already!”). I love doing laundry here in Costa Rica, especially in the dry season. Today it is cool and sunny and windy. A perfect day for laundry. Doing laundry on my front porch in Costa Rica means this:

1. Fill left side of machine with water and powdered soap. Put in clothes. Set timer for 12-15 minutes, depending on how dirty the clothes are. The ridged disk at the bottom of the tub turns this way and that, washing the clothes.

2. Drain left side tub, put clothes in cylinder on right side of the machine with holes in it. Set timer to 3 min of fast spinning, throwing water out of clothes, through a hose and into the garden (lets not talk about the environmental ramifications of me washing my clothes).

3. Fill left side of machine with water, again. This time add a capful of wonderful smelly chemical rinse stuff that I never would have used in the States but is a fine ally in the battle against mildew and must and mold here in my mountain cabina. Set timer to 12-15 minutes.

4. Drain left side tub, put clothes in cylinder on right side of the machine with holes in it. Set timer to 5 minutes of fast spinning, throwing water out of clothes, through a hose and into the garden.

5. Hang clothes on the line on my porch balcony.

6. Sit back and watch my clothes dance in the wind, breath deeply (ah, the artificial aroma of clean clothes!) and feel like I’ve done something good in my life.

Feeling extremely satisfied with myself, I continue putzing around, picking up from last nights book club meeting, washing dishes, putting dishes away (which really means taking them out of the dish drain and spreading them all over the counter so they can fully dry before I put them in the dark cabinet again). We are reading The Bone People by Keri Hulme. This morning I wonder if I am like Kerewin Holmes as I cook myself an egg and cheese sandwich, heat up sweet potato soup and pour myself a glass of red wine, smiling to myself and to Patrick Cox on The World in Words pod cast that keeps me company in the kitchen.

This is what happens when I am alone: I read and listen to pod casts almost non-stop. Not in the shower. Today I listened to Radio Lab (all about science) and The World in Words (all about language) and read parts of An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks and The Bone People. I think I probably retain a very small percentage of what I take in, but that’s ok with me.

This is why I love Oliver Sacks: after reading a detailed 40 page of a case of a painter who loses his ability to see color due to a car accident he ends the chapter with this sentence: “Three centuries later, we still have no hypothesis, and perhaps such questions can never be answered at all.” I like this so much more than Laurel Zuckerman’s painful two part interview on The World in Words (#55 and #56) in which she proclaims to understand the flaws in the French educational system in regards to teaching English, and lays out steps on how to fix it. I find her hard to listen to (I originally wrote “I want to kick her”, but then though better of it).

Now I will temporarily bid farewell to my friends Oliver, Keri, Jad, Robert and Patrick and go to meeting.