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.

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.

January January

Monday January 24, 2011

This is decided: I love having visitors. Please come visit. Jane and Ann were here for a week and now they are five hours away on the coast and I am hearing the echoes of their visit bounce around the walls of my little mountain cabina.

This is the story: Jane is turning 60 and her eldet-of-3 daughter, Julia (very good high school friend of mine), has been planning her b-day trip to Costa Rica since last May when Julia spent a few weeks here with me. It’s a sweet idea, but not that remarkable until you consider that Julia and her family kept the destination of Jane’s two week birthday trip a secret for six months. Jane did not know that she was going to Costa Rica until the night before she left. Even more remarkable: her very good high school friend, Ann, also came along. As a total secret. Jane didn’t know until she and I had arrived in the San Jose airport and Ann tapped her on the shoulder.

I realize that I am leaving large logistical holes in my story here, but the point is this: we had a good time and now they are gone and I miss them.

I am trying to think of highlights from their stay, but I find myself marveling instead at the nature of relationships, in general. How wonderful to cook and talk and laugh with two women 30 years older than I. How delightful to hear them talk about their children, their families, their lives, to hear them reminisce about high school days and college road trips.

And at the end of a week this is how I feel: I am lucky to be able to live in this beautiful place and want to share it with as many people as I can. So please feel free to stop by.
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Tonight there is a ferocious sunset. An explosion of colors. I sit at my dining room table and think of Jane. Jane loves sunsets. One could appropriately use the word “obsessed”. Sometimes I had trouble understanding what she was so excited by: until she had dragged me out and there I stood in front of it, heart opened to the world.

Tonight I stayed inside. I looked out the windows, through the trees at the splashes of sunset instead of walking five minutes down the road and through the bushes to see the entire sky ignite. A sadness, a regret came to me as I watched the colors fade: no one to share the colors with, no one to eat dinner with, or share dish duty.

I know this feeling and it is called LONELY. It’s not an entirely bad feeling, for it could not exist without the counter-balancing existence of love and good times. Yay – I have such good people in my life that I get to be sad when they are far away.
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SOME WONDERFUL THINGS:

→ The five hour ride back to Monteverde from Tamarindo, the beach town where Ann and Jane left me off to catch my shuttle. The last hour was over hilly mountains with the sun setting on the right and an uncovered Arenal Volcano on the left. Rodrigo, the shuttle driver, reached into his bag to snap some pictures of the volcano.
“Even living here you don’t get tired of the view?” I asked. He is from Cerro Plano, right next to Monteverde, and had been driving the Tamarindo – Monteverde evening route for years.
“It’s always different,” he told me.

→Just a few moments later as the sun’s last rays were bending around the curve of the earth, stretching, reaching, pushing, losing against the spin of the earth. The world was golden. Someone had spilled ink all over us as we wound through the mountains to Monteverde. We were on fire.

→This morning’s cold coffee and whole milk. How can something so simple be so delightful?

→ Sunday morning Jane and I left the apartment at 8 a.m. to walk the beach. After about 20 minutes we came across a hermit crab. I bent to examine it and heard Jane laugh.
“Oh my gosh – Ginna! Look at this!” I looked up.
“They are everywhere!” she said. At first I didn’t see, but then I stilled my eyes (now there’s a metaphor for life). Briefly frozen in place when they felt our footfall on the sand, hundreds of hermit crabs started their engines again when we stopped walking. I laughed out loud. All sizes – from pomegranate seed to walnut – they cruised up and down the beach, each zipping toward their own urgent appointment. I could almost hear the zoom-zoom-honk! of the Hermit Crab Highway.

→ That same morning I showed Jane how to use the macro setting on her camera and we took cool pictures. Spread the macro love!
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Tonight I tell Ji stories from my beach weekend with Ann and Jane and try to get a handle on my creeping loneliness.

Female Awareness

Ji-Soo got me this two hour class for Christmas and it was fantastic. The woman who gives the class is knowledgeable, funny, engaging, patient and encouraging. I wish I could gift this experience to every woman I know. The best part: the entire first hour was all about how to avoid physical confrontations, which for me was as or even more useful than the second hour of strikes and breaking holds. Check her out and pass on the word to any woman you know in the NYC area!

http://www.femaleawareness.com/

Recipe for Tears

Ingredients:
1 monthly surge of hormones
1 very good friend driving back to VA after a wonderful visit
1 vacation in NYC half over
1 movie - "UP"

Directions:
Mix.

Results:
Ginna crying on the couch. "UP" was in the "Children and Family" section, but I think it was misclassified.

Tonight over dinner we hear the Sam Phillips song "One Day Late". The opening lyrics,

"Help is coming,
Help is coming,
One day late,
One day late"

prompt me to say, "That's so sad."

Pause.

Ji-Soo, sounding a little desperate, says, "It's ok."

I laugh and say, "Don't worry, I'm not going to cry!"