RSS Feed (xml)Today marks five months to the day that we moved to this rural little village. Our stay was broken up of course by the bizarre medical situation that brought us back temporarily so in truth we've been living here for four months all told but it feels like I should mark the date anyways because it's something to me.
Every day I feel more like I live here and am also reminded that this is not my home. There are so many things that make sense, that feel right, that I am figuring out and many others that make me realize I still and will for a long while not understand how things here are done.
The other day I was driving M to school and we pass a dead horse on the side of the road. Horses run wild here and as anywhere cars and nature don't mix. As I passed it I wondered what happens next, who gets called (is there anyone to call?) and what gets done. As I am driving back from town a bit later I see the same horse but this time there are several tires piled up on it's body and curiouser still, I wonder again. The question is answered a few hours later as I drive past once again and now the horse and the tires are on fire, a great big side of the road fire that makes me want to close my eyes but I cannot. Within a day or so there is nothing to ever mark the horse or the tires or the fire at all. Ashes to ashes, jungle style.
I don't know what to think about this, just like I don't know what to think about so many things from weird bugs to kids without pencils to battered cars puttering their way over dirt roads with six or more kids inside. It's just so goddamn rural and poor here, the poorest homeless guy I used to know on the streets in the States has more than most do here. And yet somehow it works. Somehow it doesn't matter that no one has anything, that in an increasingly globalized and techno-savvy world that years and generations pass along exactly like this and people fall in love and farm their land and make babies and get sick and go to school and on and on and on.
Yesterday morning started bad, M completely unhappy with any of our admittedly meager breakfast options (our fridge is so small it can only hold so much) so she's whining and I'm losing patience and my tone is probably bullshit when all of a sudden I hear a voice, our friend, the one I talked about in my last post is at the door. I brought you waffles she says, and she walks in with two enormous waffles still warm from her stove. I made extra and I thought you might like some and I hug her and tell her exactly how much we do and M sits happily at eats the biggest one down to the last bite. For a moment I worry she heard us arguing but I know she lives too far away for that and I realize it's just her being kind and things once again finding their way of working themselves out, the underlying current that races through so many moments here, the pulse of a community just doing what it does.
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