Things that got eaten while we were away...

Termites are responsibel for the first two pictures. The last two...a saber toothed rat perhaps?

The window...

The cookbook...

The ice-tray...

And the tea kettle.

Homecoming

I’ll admit that the first day back was a little intimidating. A fine layer of dust and ash coated every inch of floor and furniture. Lizard poop and what looked suspiciously like rat pellets were sprinkled like perverse confetti over my dishes and silky spider webs fluttered in the breeze like eerie party streamers. I felt like our home was the playhouse we had outgrown for a season and were now coming back to inspect in a nostalgic moment. The refrigerator, warm enough to be make-believe, was littered with the carcasses or tiny jewel-colored beetles. How did they get in there? Termites had tunneled through one of my cookbooks, leaving it a mess of dirt and half eaten recipes for baked oatmeal and chocolate cake. And our tent…oh, our tent. It bore sad testimony to the seasonal winds that have already knocked down our bamboo fence a half a dozen times. It was hard to know where to start.

Bryan began by hooking up the solar panels and I filtered mosquito larvae out of the stagnant water left in our tank. But while I did, a line from my mother-in-law’s most recent e-mail kept flitting through my head. "But I will tell both of you this, it will be very hard there with a baby...wonderful, but hard." I looked at my reflection in the murky water, and for the first time in this pregnancy, felt my confindence waver.

But I woke up this morning with renewed optimism. One of the things that most affects me about this place when I have been gone for a while is the silence. No cars, TVs or loud music. The silence isn’t empty though. It’s flecked with the sounds of wind, birds and far-off children and their goats. Rich silence. In fact this morning brought to my mind and senses memories of my grandparent’s house in Carazozo, New Mexico, - odd because they haven’t lived there in a long time and I only have a handful of memories of ever having been there myself. But something about the cool, dry air whispering through the rain gutter felt familiar from a long time ago.  

There are things I do not like about living where I do, things that I know will not get easier with a baby. I hate having to sweep sand out of my kitchen every morning, but I love having a breeze skirt through my entire house all day. I hate having to flush the toilet with buckets, but I love being forced to live in a way that makes me treasure and appreciate every bucket full. I hate having to substitute half of the ingredients the recipe calls for, but I love cooking with only what is ripe, available and in season. I hate the occasional rat that finds its way too close to home, but, I confess, I love the daily adventure of wildlife, exotic and not-so-exotic, that finds its way into our fence.

Last night the winds kicked up at around two in the morning. It howled and tumbled over us, carrying sounds from the desert in the North. We lay awake listing to every creak and bang, praying the roofs would stay put and the fence would stand strong. I could hear the sand slipping in under the door and lying in wait for me on the kitchen floor. At one point I rolled over to my side and my daughter woke up. She began kicking furiously, pushing her skin against mine, fingertips against my insides. The feeling almost tickled and it made me smile in the dark. I could feel her curiosity, her interest in this strange outside world. And it comforted me to think that maybe, just maybe, I was in the company of someone else intimidated by the immensity of this world, but enchanted by all it has to offer. Maybe she is just as excited about seeing this world as I am about showing it to her. As wonderful and hard as it may be.        

Stars

Over the past couple weeks my parents have welcomed a houseful of holiday refugees into their home, filling this place with laughter as games, food and family traditions form a patchwork of happiness across the house. Every bed and empty seat around the dining room table has been filled up and we have stayed up way too late playing outrageous games of “telephone pictionary” and “blind man’s bluff”.

On the evening of New Year’s Day, however, we were more subdued. Too much pie and too little sleep made us all a little more contentedly quiet, and a group of us found ourselves lying on our backs looking up at the stars on the cement slab in the backyard. Far from any city lights, the sky was like a Turkish lamp, night-colored brass letting out pinpoints of bright white light. It seemed like it had been a while since I had laid out and looked at the stars. In retrospect, it was a good way to usher in the New Year.

The sky was huge. I needed chameleon eyes to take it all in at once, from one tree fringed end to the other. We lay in the dark, disembodied voices floating around each other as we pointed out familiar constellations and made up our own, measuring light years with our fingertips. Like I always do, I felt like I needed more than just my eyes to soak up the fullness of the stars, as though tasting and hearing stars could somehow help me absorb its grandeur, were that even possible. For the next hour or so, our conversation wandered on unmarked paths through the stars, paying visits to both the laughable and the profound: Papa talked about his cousins in Roswell, New Mexico who swear they’ve seen UFOs. Ross pondered whether or not space is really expanding beyond itself. Abigail wondered out loud if we were seeing old light, the ghosts of long-dead stars. Then someone asked if we believed in ghosts at all which set off a string of stories about strange incidents in childhood houses. We laughed and shivered in the dark, and I thanked the artisan of human curiosity for being considerate enough to carve out a universe of mysteries for us to explore.

We saw a few dim meteors graze the sky as we talked and occasional satellites stalked metrically across the night. But just as our conversation was fading out and the couch inside was beginning to sound more comfortable than the cement at our backs, the night sky exploded with the most beautiful falling star I have even seen. Leaving sparks of white hot light in its wake, it burned brilliantly across the sky for eternal seconds. Without chameleon eyes, our heads followed it like sunflowers. It was almost impossible to believe that something so stunning was completely soundless, though we filled the vacuum with our collective gasp. And when it finally fizzled out over the horizon, without thought or words, we all erupted in spontaneous applause. It must have seemed silly, a dozen mosquito-nibbled people lying on the ground clapping at the sky. But sometimes nothing else will do.