Overdue Photo Update

This was a post I started in February, but lack of access to fast internet makes uploading pictures boring, so I stopped.


This is the sunset over the Gulf of Nicoya. The Gulf of Nicoya is beautiful and being able to see it is one of my favorite things about living in Monteverde.


This is sapote, a fruit I discovered one day at the farmer's market. I've tried it twice and realized that it's not a fruit I think I'll buy again, but we did have a good time together. Brown and papery on the outside,


red and slick and smooth on the inside.


Big 'ole center pit.


Good with coffee.


This was one of two twin pits I found in a sapote one day. What a beautiful, curvy, shiny thing it is. (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapote)

Jacotes before consumption.


Jacotes post consumption. (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondias_purpurea)


My walk home after work. Very bright, whole sky rainbows are not uncommon in Monteverde.

Friday Morning Human Offensive

Friday February 4, 2011

Thursday night I saw few ants. I thought that maybe this occupation had been too costly for them, the casualties too great. I thought they had packed and gone.
Friday morning I realized that I was wrong. Not only were they back full force (had they taken the night off?), they had violated the previously agreed upon understanding which dictated that they would stick to the walls and corners of my house and not march across open spaces. Specifically, my bathroom floor, over my olive green woven mat where I keep my naked feet warm on cold mornings, especially before 6 a.m. And here I thought I had given up.

I remembered that Dad used to wet a sponge with bleach and wipe down counters on warm, sticky, summer days in upstate New York. I remembered the chemicals I had: Clorox Anit-Hongo spray. I went to town and did not feel remorse.

This evening there is not a wiggly ant to be seen.

On a more mysterious note: I arrived home last night to find bird poop on my kitchen counter. How did this happen? I leave my windows open during the day but can not imagine a bird finding its way thru the small space between the glass panes. I saw no bird – it must have, improbably, found its way out again, but not before wrecking havoc on my house. Bird poop was found not only on the kitchen counter but on my bed, the dining room window and, tonight, the electric range on the stove. I picture a small bird, frantic, trapped in my house, crapping its brains out trying to find its way back home. I do hope it found its way out or else I fear that I will find a lightweight bird carcass sometime soon.

Reflections On the Death of a Community Member

Yesterday a man died – a long-standing member of the community. Today school got out at 12 for a funeral at 2. I want to say something poetic and profound, but its just not there. I want to be able to put into words what this feels like: a call at 7 p.m. Thursday, being part in a phone tree, word spreading quickly to all members of the school and community. I’ve never worked in a school that doubles as a funeral space before. The cemetery is next to the school, where we take kids sometimes for group activities.

It feels…nice. It feels like sliding over to give a stranger space on a bench. It feels like compassion.

My Bucket List

How appropriate that these are the thoughts that follow.

This is how un-cool I am:
Setting: Teacher lounge, Monteverde Friends School, Monteverde, Costa Rica
Characters: Two co-workers and myself
I sit browsing new pictures on Facebook. When I get to work before 7 a.m. I feel comfortable with a guilty peruse of Facebook by 9. I see pictures of my bad-ass sister, smiling wickedly into the camera with her father next to her. They each straddle a motorcycle – hers metallic blue, his dark red, and they’ve just gone on a joyride. I think: I love this. I think: I want this. I want to be bad-ass and joyride Florida streets with Dennis and Heather. The title of the photo album where I found these pictures is “Cross Riding with Dad off the Bucket List”.

I’m envious. I must find out everything about this, and then do it myself. I start with vocabulary.
I turn to my co-workers:
“Do you guys know anything about motorcycles?”
“No,” one of them responds. “Why, do you want to get one?”
“Well, kinda” I say, feeling a little exposed, “but that’s not why I ask. I was wondering if you knew some motorcycle terminology.”
“What?”
“What’s a bucket list?”
They laugh. “I know a bucket list to be a list of things you want to do before you die. You know, before you kick the bucket.”
Click, click, click.
“Ooohhhh….that makes a lot more sense.”

I tell my sister about my silly little mistake and she asks the question that will not leave my head all day: “Now that you know, are you going to make one?” I am immediately enthralled: of course I want to make a bucket list! Lists are my favorite things, ever. I write Ji-Soo and tell him we should write bucket lists. He finds the title a little morbid and suggests a few tamer (lamer?) possibilities. But I wonder:

-once you put an item on a bucket list, can it be taken off?
-if you die and don’t do some of the things that you’ve put on your bucket list, do you go to hell? HaHa! Just kidding – but I am overwhelmed by the idea.
-Do you actually write out a bucket list?
-What goes on a bucket list? What degree of vagueness or specificity is necessary? What degree is allowed?

I know some of you will be tempted to respond and say, “It is your bucket list, make it what you want”, but I am not interested in this. I want someone, sometwos or threes or fours or more, to tell me the rules governing their bucket lists, or why they don’t have a bucket list.
I’ve picked it up and now I can’t put it down.

Under Attack

Wednesday February 2, 2011

I am under attack - again. This is not the first time this year that my Costa Rica home has been marching grounds for thousand of industrious little ants. I didn’t write about it last time not because it wasn’t remarkable but rather because I was so appalled and disgusted by my living circumstances.

Last time was different: I saw some ants, figured they would swarm in, do their thing, and be gone, taking with them any bug carcasses and crumbs they had encountered. I was so wrong. They came, they stayed, they clumped into a healthy grape fruit sized mass at the seam in the wall of my entryway. What did I do? Nothing, at first. I was too horrified to react. After a day I sprinkled Gold Bond athlete foot powder, the closest thing to Borax I could find, in the doorway to my bedroom and living room. Because, you know, ants can’t climb walls. The pulsing mass only grew.

Then, I gave up. I stuck my head in the sand. I lived with the repulsive mass for days, pretending it was not there. Ugh. I don’t even want to think about it.

Eventually, after about a week, the mass went away, leaving behind only the spent shells of hundreds of colony members, sprinkled neatly along the foot of the wall.

This time it is different. It started on Saturday with a gentle stream of much smaller ants parading out of a crack in the floor by my front door. They were almost cute in their precision. Almost.

I was dismayed. Again? I don’t want it. I was then struck by an idea – an idea I took to be divine intervention. I heated water in the kettle and filled the ant hole with boiling water a la Grandma Barnes weed control on the front walk.

I walked around all day with my chest puffed out. Not a single ant came back out of that hole. Boy, I sure was feeling good about myself. Fast forward to Tuesday night when I discovered a stream of ants coming from the space between the wall and the floor under my bathroom sink. This is the same space that Julia and I had shoved a wad of clear tape into last May to keep out the scorpion we saw escape via that route.

I’m getting tired of this story, so let me just say that it didn’t work as well (at all) this time (times) and now I have
1) boiled ant bodies and gritty cement wall crumbs spread across the bathroom floor, where they floated to when I splashed boiling water at them and
2) ants flowing steadily to and from who knows where.
And again, I give up. They can win.