So on the rare occasion that food left on my plate, it is customary to share the leftovers with the numerous dogs that share our habitat here in Guanacaste. They know when meals are being served and they are never far away. Less trained, but also ready to hop on the caboose of every meal are the chickens. I have a strained relationship with these chickens – they have always seemed to me to be fat, nasty, feathery lizards that leave mites and God knows what else in the air when panic seizes them and they start flapping. Apart from that, there also seems to be no understanding on the behalf of one particular rooster that he will never be mistaken for a songbird. Even Sharon would give him a nasty look and then hit the X. It's not just the melody, either, there's also timing issues. 4:30 in the a.m. is not appropriate to belt out the song that you carry in your heart, little guy.
Is it SO awful that tonight, when I threw my extra arroz con pollo out into the grass, I didn't stop Mr. I'm-going-to-make-sleep-impossible-for-you from eating his own kind? Is it SO terrible that I felt a sort of pleasing vengeance?
Yeah, I think it is. But at least it was followed by a creeping sensation that nothing this rooster does registers in his little pea-brain, and that I can't actually hold a grudge against a creature like that. As he finished chomping down on his amiguito I told him that now I understood him better. We're cool now, the rooster and me.
Along those same lines, the nature that I'm in right now has been kind of overwhelming this last week but at least it's normalizing poco a poco. On Monday, a tarantula and a venomous snake appeared in my house within half an hour of each other. Luckily, the surrounding Guanacastecos were a lot quicker on their feet than I could have hoped and were able to dispatch both creatures and quickly. I lamely offered to keep eyes on the snake so that it “couldn't get away” but really I stood and stared because snakes are so far out of my realm of knowledge that I had no idea what else to do but stare. With the tarantula...well, I do know spiders and I ended up on top of a table, as usual. The only thing that did change was the volume of my scream – proportionate to the size of the bicho.
And the mosquitoes. Really, I don't think it's any worse than moving to tidewater Virginia. They're everywhere, they eat me alive, end of story. The only difference I see is that the Virginia mosquitoes are indiscriminate...they'll take whatever piece of you they can get. Costa Rican mosquitoes are smart little buggers (pun intended!) and go for your ankles. It's like the know that my ankle is the furthest part away on my body from my hand. Less chance they get hit, and the damage points are through the roof! I spend a surprising portion of my day bent over or balancing on one leg, scratching the small angry volcanoes that don't run out of burn for days. But, in the end I suppose what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Erm. Except maybe malaria. That ish will leave you weak and vulnerable for the rest of your life.
But I actually feel pretty good about most things I can't control here nature-wise despite the previous examples (y'all know me – I just can't resist the hyperbolic). That used to be a big thing for me, was to feel protected from all things icky. I guess “protected from icky” has taken on new dimensions, though, just like every other thing to which I had given definition in my adult life before I arrived at site. I might have slept over at a friend's house in the US before sleeping in the same room where I knew there were lizards. I would have woken people up at 1 a.m. in the US before thinking of touching that centipede on my den wall, even with a wadded up paper towel. Now it's kind of like...“Well, I guess my mosquito net can multi-task lizards,” as I move slowly so as not to disturb my nighttime visitor. Or, “That cricket is no match for even my flimsiest flip-flop.”
Am I ready to go toe to toe-toe-toe-toe-toe-toe-toe-toe with another tarantula? Of course not, and I certainly appreciate someone who's willing to take lead in that situation. But at least I don't feel like I have to be living within a bubble to be comfortable anymore. Positively flexible, and that one's for you, Randy! The bees, the ants, the abejones, the iguanas, the moths the size of bats, the bats themselves, chickens, mosquitoes and snakes...if they show up in my house, I've still got things to do and people to see. Not the end of my world. Although usually the end of theirs if I can swing it.
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