The Most Awful Awfulness May 5, 2011
Posted by EDW in Life, Marriage.Tags: brown recluse, bugs, bugs on your face, centipedes, infestation, maggots, Marriage
7 comments
At our house, there is an unspoken policy of tolerance towards all creatures. Wasps, moths, and beetles, when discovered, are scooped into a cup and charitably relocated out-of-doors. Spiders are generally allowed to cohabitate with us, because they eat pesky mosquitoes and gnats. But apparently word is out among the bug community: we’re suckers. And now our house is under siege by creatures that even my pacifistic and nature-loving heart cannot abide.
Yesterday I found a plastic bag of maggoty potatoes under my sink. When I lifted the sack to put it into the wastebasket, there was a slick of thick, yellow fluid underneath it. I’m not sure what it says about me as a person that for weeks (months?) this kind of nastiness has been going on under my very nose, unabrogated. At least I determined the source for all the little kamikaze flies I keep finding in my wine. So that’s one problem solved.
"I want to eat your face. Nom nom nom nom."
But what to do about the brown recluses and the sinister centipedes? They’ve invaded my house as well, and there’s no tell-tale stench to indicate where their headquarters might be. Sly little beasties, those arthropods. Last weekend, my husband woke me up in the middle of the night by flinging off the covers and shouting, “SOMETHING’S CRAWLING ON ME!” I, sleepy and slow to react, watched with faint interest as he staggered to the bathroom and turned on the light. Here’s how it went down: (more…)
Mardi, Mardi, Mardi Gras! March 14, 2011
Posted by EDW in New Orleans.Tags: Holidays, Lent, Louisiana, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, promises, Travel, vacation
2 comments
Greetings, blogosphere! I salute you after many months of silence! You must forgive me–I’ve been in grad school, trying to learn how to write so that my sentences will evolve into sleek, pelted, swimmy things–like otters–instead of clumsy, bushy, lumbering beasts.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I want to talk about a promise I made and kept. The promise was to myself, and I made it standing in my kitchen one year ago on Mardi Gras day. I had spent the morning watching costumed revelers and parades online. While the citizens of New Orleans danced in the city’s rare light, I was in Texas, sitting at a computer in my pajamas. For supper I made a big pot of jambalaya, and tried to get drunk and dance in my kitchen, but it only made me feel sad and silly and far from home. I looked my husband dead in the eye and said, “Next year I will be at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Come hell or high water, I will dance in the streets.”
And I did.
Preservation Hall band parades through the Marigny.
Krewe of Bacchus parade float.
Here I am on Lundi Gras, gorging myself on King Cake.
Here I am on Mardi Gras day, dressed as Eve (of Biblical infamy) with a lady whose sign says it all.
It was one of the best days of my life, and it only took me about twelve seconds to realize that I never want to be anywhere but New Orleans on Mardi Gras day, ever again. There IS no other place. Stay tuned for more….
The Prodigal Hen August 12, 2010
Posted by EDW in chickens.Tags: eggs, farming, free-range, gypsies, hens, lifestyle, livestock, prodigal chicken, raising chickens, runaways, urban chickens
3 comments
In spite of myself, ever since she disappeared I’ve thought maybe Goldie was dead. I tried to be vigilantly positive; whenever this thought surfaced, I crushed it like a ripe tomato and flung the pulp back into the dense foliage of my subconscious. She isn’t dead, I told myself. She isn’t dead, she’s simply gone away. But from a distance, Goldie looks so much like two other gyspy hens camped in the woods around our house, that I worried I was kidding myself about whether or not my chicken, the one I raised from a chick, and who used to drink wine with me from an acorn-cap chalice, was still alive.
Until yesterday morning.
The gypsy chickens were gathered around the chicken coop, waiting for me to fill Petunia’s food pan. The usual characters were all there—the three Rogues, the snooty blonde, the two shy, ghostly silvers, and the reds. But this time, instead of two reds there were three.
“Look, honey,” I said to my husband, hope lifting the edges of my voice. “I wonder if one of them is our Goldie?” I crouched and peered at her through the chicken wire. It was hard to tell.
“Goldie?” I asked. She turned her head and pretended not to know me. But later, she climbed the gangplank to the Chateau’s interior and pecked around inside, seemingly at ease within the structure. I watched her through the Chateau’s open window.
“Goldie,” I said, “I know that’s you.”
She looked me straight in the eye and lit a cigarette. (more…)
And Then There Was One August 4, 2010
Posted by EDW in chickens.Tags: chicken sex, chickens, defection, gypsy chickens, the love that dare not speak its name
8 comments
One of my chickens has defected. It wouldn’t be such a big deal for Goldie to abandon me and the roomy comforts of the Chicken Chateau—there’s that old adage about if you love something, let it go—but when she left, she also deserted her last and only sister, Petunia. Goldie’s defection reduced my flock by fifty percent, because she was one of only two chickens left from my original flock of ten.
A single, sad, solitary cartoon hen.
As of Monday afternoon, I have one chicken.
Here’s a basic reconstruction of events: Monday morning I let the girls out of the Chateau for their first foray into our new yard. I was all ready to sit on the front porch and sip coffee while I supervised their exploration. One thing I did not forsee (stupidly, I admit) was the likelihood that the girls would be sexually assaulted within minutes of entering the yard by one of the three Rogue Roosters that regularly patrol the premises. The Rogues, like their harem of wild hens, belong to no one. They’re gypsy chickens, camping in the woods at night and coming around in the morning to snatch at my ferns and any stray bits of chicken kibble I might have dribbled on my way to the coop. They are a proud and independent bunch, and I admire their ability to survive in the wild, unaided by human attention—an ability I did not think chickens possessed. But I digress. (more…)
Where the Deer and the Antelope Play July 31, 2010
Posted by EDW in Life, My Crazy-Ass Neighbors.Tags: Andy Griffith, Home, modern-day-Mayberry, Texas, Wimberley
3 comments
I’ve only been back from Mexico for nine days, and my expansive, adventure-filled Caribbean summer is already like the wisps of a dream recalled hours after waking. Maybe that’s because three months ago, when we were alternately depositing truckloads of our worldly possessions at the thrift store or cramming into a storage unit those things with which we could not bear to part, I was reasonably certain that we were also saying goodbye to the small town of Wimberley, Texas, where we’d been living for the past three(ish) years. I was convinced that when we came back to the States, we’d be moving to Austin, or at least to San Marcos, where I’ll start my graduate courses next month. Maybe I’m just bad at anticipating, but it seems to me that fate has a funny way of consistently arranging events in the least-expected ways. And so it is that I find myself back in Wimberley, freshly installed in a wee house tucked among the fragrant junipers and hunchbacked live oaks so characteristic of the Texas hill country.
This could totally happen in Wimberley.
It occurs to me that many of my far-flung readers may have never visited or even heard of Wimberley. Which means I’ve been remiss, because in three years of living and blogging in Wimberley, I never once described the place where I lived. Shame on me. (more…)
Mental Snapshots July 19, 2010
Posted by EDW in Mexico.Tags: beach, Life, memories, mental snapshots, Mexico, Riviera Maya life, Travel, vacation
3 comments
I can’t believe how quickly the past two and a half months have gone! Today is our last full day in Puerto Aventuras–tomorrow we’ll spend the night in Cancun so that we’re close enough to the airport to make our flight on time. We’ve spent this last day watching the sun rise over the Caribbean, pedaling around Puerto on bikes, swimming in the pool, watching the intermittent rain, eating the leftovers, and trying to figure out how to fit forty pounds of seashells into our luggage.
I also spent some time looking through the hundreds of pictures we’ve taken. But even with my husband’s incessant picture-taking, there are still some wonderful memories that weren’t preserved by camera. Some of my favorites:
1.) Riding one of the local buses home from the grocery store on a particular Saturday afternoon. Because Mexicans typically work a six-and-a half-day work week, Saturday afternoons have a relaxed party vibe, similar to a Friday evening happy-hour in the States. Even without the rigorous work schedule to give it context, I was enjoying the mood aboard the bus, which was filled with people going home to their families. There was raucous accordion music blaring from the bus speakers, and two men in the front were sharing a six pack of beers. One of them, a middle-aged man wearing a sleeveless undershirt, denim shorts, and a bowtie, was having an especially good time. Every time the bus would stop, he would get up and dance around the front of the bus,with a beer in one hand and the other hand clasped over his heart, as though clutching an invisible companion to his chest. The other passengers acted like he was invisible, but I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. When I got off the bus, he bowed courteously to me. (more…)
Rain, Reactions, and Random Research or The Story of How I Don’t Have Lip Herpes, But Most Likely Need to Renounce Bananas July 6, 2010
Posted by EDW in Life, Mexico.8 comments
Today, like you, I am not in Belize. Nor am I in a car zooming down Carretera Federal 307 towards the Belizian border. Nor am I at a roadblock having our rental car searched by the Mexican cops. Although we had planned to celebrate our third wedding anniversary with a jaunt down to Belize for some rain forest hiking and another stamp in the ol’ passport, I was woken at midnight by the sounds of a deluge outside the bedroom window. I woke again at 5:00 a.m. to find that it was still pouring. To call this weather rain would be like calling the Norman invasion a parade. It was an ambush of rain. An overwhelming, unrelenting assault of droplets. Which coalesced into mini-lakes. And which wouldn’t have been a problem except that these lagitos amalgamated on top of the highway. People were wading across the 307, knee-deep in water.
Ever the optimists, we picked up the rental car anyway, but after driving along the flooded highway at about 5 m.p.h. with water slapping at the car’s undercarriage, we decided to postpone the trip until tomorrow.
So we went home, changed out of our wet clothes, and had some lunch. Which included a banana. A very, very delicious banana. It was so tasty that while I was eating it, I said out loud, “Wow, this is a really good banana.”
And that’s when a secret banana-hating gene that has lain hidden and dormant inside my DNA for 33 years decided to join the ongoing conversation of my bodily functions. This gene’s first contribution manifested as a sudden itchy, tingly, blistery hive on my lip approximately four minutes after finishing the banana. Only I didn’t know it was a hive because I’ve never had hives before. I ran to the bathroom to inspect what felt like the sudden onset of a pimple, and when I looked in the mirror, I screamed. My husband came to see what the matter was, and I was all panicky, pointing at my lip and whimpering. My first response (because I have been eating bananas all my life with no ill effects) was to conclude that I must have contracted lip-herpes from a drinking glass at a restaurant. I was all about to cry, thinking that now I was a person with lip herpes, and I was going to have to get my head around that and on my anniversary, to boot. Jim, on the other hand, was reasonably certain it was something I had eaten. (more…)
Swimming May 29, 2010
Posted by EDW in Mexico.Tags: American living abroad, being scared to swim, Caribbean, fear, lifestyle, Mexico, snorkeling, swimming
8 comments
I used to be a person who was scared of the water.Not only was I afraid of swimming, I thought I was a bad swimmer–so bad, in fact, that I didn’t trust that I could keep myself from drowning. I think I was scared of water because when I was a kid I overheard my mother say to someone that I wasn’t a strong swimmer. I think she was talking to a friend about me going to summer camp, and was expressing her natural motherly concerns that I might drown (or get devoured by a crocodile). I’m sure she didn’t have any idea that I was eavesdropping on her conversation; nonetheless, I took that phrase–not a strong swimmer–and made it part of myself. It’s funny what kinds of labels people cling to as a way of defining themselves; I’d probably never given my swimming skills a thought before that day.
My artificial fear of water lasted well into adulthood, and for no real reason. I had never suffered an incident where I almost drowned. I had never been bitten by a shark or a water moccasin, or even stung by a jellyfish. I had two strong arms and two strong legs. Yet, whenever I got into water that was deeper than my head, I got all pannicky and started hyperventilating. My ex tried to teach me to swim several times, thinking that the acquisition of some skill would dispel the fear, but knowing how to move my limbs in the water was never the issue. In retrospect, think I was holding onto that fear as a way of knowing something about myself at a time when I was desperate to know who (and why) I was. Like, “This is who I am: I have green eyes and freckles. I don’t like turnips. I’m afraid of the water.”
The truth is–and I’ve only discovered this in the past five or six years–I love to swim. And I do it just fine. I’m not an Olympian or anything, but I can move my body around in the water adequately, and I haven’t drowned yet. I love to swim in swimming pools and rivers and lakes, but most of all I love to swim in the ocean. And what I really, REALLY love is snorkeling. There’s so much cool stuff in the ocean to look at, and I love being out there in it! There are fish of every imaginable color and shape, there are snails the size of your feet, there are worms with heads like feather-dusters that live in hard, vertical tubes and worms with soft, brightly colored spines like water-logged caterpillars. There are sponges that look like leafless purple trees and brain corals the size of easy chairs. There are stingrays the size of coffee tables that undulate and ripple when they swim. There are bright yellow mat-like corals that spread across the ocean floor like slime mold and long-legged creeping red sea stars and ominous looking urchins with ten-inch spines secreted beneath rock ledges. There’s a whole other world of astonishing life forms underneath the waves, eating and fighting an mating and ejecting their guts as a defense mechanism. And I love being out there, like an alien on my own planet, moving through their weird, wet world with a mask stuck to my face.
The thing is, I wouldn’t have known ANY of this if I hadn’t challenged long-held idea (which wasn’t even my idea but someone else’s) and jumped in the water. I don’t remember how or when it happened–I think it was a gradual realization that I could, in fact, swim just fine and that I loved doing it.
The lesson is obvious: don’t let other people tell you who you are and what you should, shouldn’t, or can’t do. And don’t be afraid to revisit something you thought you were scared of. You might discover it’s your new favorite thing. In the end, I think the things you fear and dislike say less about you than the things you love, the causes you champion, your favorites and bests.
Fraud, Fracas, and Free Fire Show May 25, 2010
Posted by EDW in Mexico.Tags: American living abroad, bank fraud, Caribbean life, fire and water show, Integratedidea.com, Mexico, Puerto Avenuras, theft
4 comments
So, the last couple of days have been kind of hard. I know you’re thinking, “Oh gag. You live in the Caribbean.” And trust me, I’m not asking for sympathy: things are still great. Mainly I think the euphoria of the first two weeks is starting to melt into the day to day practicalities of life in another country–without a car. Mix in a bit of post-birthday melancholy (my birthday and Christmas are my favorite holidays and I look forward to them for weeks; after all the anticipation, time seems a loose and empty) and the fact that the downstairs neighbors have been on a 72-hour bender of shrieking and perhaps hurling things at one another–possibly their crying baby. It’s no wonder that I’ve lost my own patience a few times in the last few days when we’ve taken the colectivo somewhere (twice) only to discover that we either didn’t have our wallet, or the directions to the place where we were going. Which is not only a waste of time, but a waste of money. (Ever gotten to the grocery store only to realize you had no wallet? It makes you want that wine you aren’t getting even more.) Plus, Eunice died. Oh, and let’s not forget the fraud.
Yesterday morning I discovered a mysterious charge for $4.93 on our bank account from an unknown company identifying itself as “Integratedidea.com”. A little internet research quickly revealed it to be some kind of scammy-thefty-fraudulent foulness. So I emailed the bank and asked them to remove the charge and cancel my card. If only I were home in the states I would call the U.S. Attorney General’s office and beg them to use my tax dollars on something that actually matters to me, like capturing the dill-holes who masterminded this thievery and sentencing them to cleaning my bathroom. For life.
But this evening I suggested a walk on the beach to enjoy the moonlight and the breeze. And a reprieve from the wee banshee that lives below us. The moonlight glittering on the Caribbean would have been enough, but we were in the right place at the right time, and happened upon one of the big, fancy resorts setting the stage for their “Fire and Water” show–which we got to watch for free. Of course we had to watch from the back since we were perched on a little rock wall above the ocean, but the less-than-perfect view was more than made up for by the free-ness and the sense of happenstance.
Free stuff always cheers me up. Especially when it’s an exhilarating frenzy of drums and fire. Now I’m back inside the apartment, listening to the downstairs neighbors duke it out below. That’s free too, I guess.
(Mediocre photo was also free, since it was lifted from TripAvisor.)
A Poem for Eunice May 24, 2010
Posted by EDW in Books and Writing, chickens.Tags: chickens, Dead Chicken, Fat Eunice, poetry, writing
5 comments
Found out this morning that one of my (former) chickens has died. Though it was their surrogate caretaker and not me who found her, I have happened upon my share of dead hens. You’d think it would get easier, that a person would get used to it, but it’s always the same sick feeling, the same amount of unexpected awfulness. Here is a poem I wrote about the experience.
Dead Chicken
When I came out I saw feathers and stillness,
The once-neat wings open and askew.
Lying on her side, not moving, not illness
Even from a distance, I knew;
I didn’t have to see the blood.
Yet where was the beast who was not feasting,
Who killed for sport and not for food?
I ran and prayed that she was breathing
That she might be saved or at least soothed
That I might chance to follow violence
With gentle words and gratitude
As she moved from life to silence.
I knelt beside her; I was too late.
Her eyes were blind as beads.
Don’t cry, I told myself, ’tis Nature’s trait;
Killing is a common need.
I was warned not to love her, it was good advice
For she was herself but a beast
But the heart is a rebel and love is its vice
Hens or whores—it loves what it pleases
And always pays the price.
EDW
05/24/10
For Eunice.
