Happy equinox, whatever your climate

Che and I were both baking in Havana

I seem to have fallen out of Nature. When they built my apartment a hundred years ago, they didn’t bother with niceties like insulation, and my toes remember cold winter days when they fantasized about thick socks and soft slippers. But my armpits are mindful of the recent relentless drip of summer’s sunshine sweat, when shade was salvation and water the only goal that mattered. Such is the thermal chaos when you hop from the (relative) chill of California winter to the motivated baking of the Cuban sun, which doesn’t believe tall tales of winter cold.

Hot metal in the streets of Santiago de Cuba

We were sweating in Havana when they told us that in our next destination, Santiago de Cuba, “It’s twice as hot as here.” This was not unwelcome news, since I would happily spend the rest of my life in shorts and flip flops, but a few hours taught us that it’s not a good idea to walk around too long in the sun in Santiago. Your first reminder is the wooziness.

Santiago is…

In Santiago we…

In the narrow streets of homicidal drivers and Caribbean splendor were...too many things to tell of right now, there will be time for that. But today I’m looking at the orchid that erupted on my kitchen counter while we were gone, the birds paired up in the water of Lake Merritt, and the confident warmth of a sun that’s coming back into its strength. Today is the equinox, transition point between winter and spring, and nature needs no customs agent (thank goddess). Spring has already opened the drapes, and after the hardest winter of my life thus far, I am ready to greet it with open arms.

Cuba is a place of endless stories, and I’ll try to pick a few (I promise they won’t all involve my armpit sweat), but today I am happy where I am, focused on now, loving this moment. There’s a certain preschooler (who we missed every day abroad) practicing his letters to my left, a cup of tea in front of me, and a window open to spring’s flirtation on the right, so with a grin and a toast I greet you: happy spring, my friends!

June is made of such things

A year ago I was here, Nyaung Shwe, Myanmar

June always surprises me. It’s almost never June, and then all of a sudden that’s what the calendars say, but just long enough to read the word before the page flops again.

Not like October, which lingers a little longer than it’s supposed to, because really: who’s going to stop it? Or January, a jerk of a month that steals at least a week from everyone around it. But both bow to March, a leviathan epoch that stretches like Purgatory and won’t let you go until your soul has almost given up hope...

But then it does, let go, eventually. And you find yourself in the renewal of April, which exists in nearly proper parameters. May is real too, though it only lasts six days. But June? June is a single perfect evening. It’s the Saturday BBQ that goes better than you expected, that’s June. That one square on the calendar, where the dogs are smiling, your friends are happy to see you, and the food tastes perfect in soft air. June is made of optimism, and flits away from the light of day.

July? July is a myth, a conspiracy so they can charge more for calendars. My passport says I was born in a July, but I know better; you can’t be born in a rumor. No, when you think it’s July, it’s already August, a month that lasts a week of ten days as you prepare and resign yourself...

So you and I had better enjoy June while it lasts. And it's now. Right now. Go check. Today AND tomorrow. And not only that, but this June-sliver has somehow encompassed so much, like a defeated nation regaining long-lost territory, and they tell me we’re only halfway.

Our guide kept telling us about "mountain cats"
then pointed at these and laughed uproariously

May echoed with the concrete cracks of falling walls, as the life I thought I was building fell apart, and June popped open in the pause of silence when only the dust was still moving. But it hasn’t stayed silent. It’s already included so many words, from “the rent is twice what you're paying now” to “that unit has already been rented.” But those have been balanced by “nice to meet you” or even better: “so good to see you!” and “it’s been too long!” The dust of demolition smells more like woodsmoke in the evening and maple syrup in the morning, now.

Those things I lost in May? The house, the girl, the work situation, the life trajectory? Things are...on their way, on the mend, on the way up. I should hear about an apartment soon. I have articles to write, contacts to convert into friends, and the chance to work with/for people who are made entirely of congealed light and concentrated joy. And the girl? There is health there, reason to smile, a deep sense of progress both internal and external, and cause for optimism.

And, after all, June is made of optimism.

Happy Eostre and Easter from Belgium!

Easter last year was dinner with (full-grown) family then a midnight flight to Nicaragua. This year is a little different, in one very large (and very small) way.

A small smile keeps coming back as I remember my own childhood Easters. Putting hard-boiled eggs in copper wire holders, and lowering them into dye that will forever come to mind when I smell vinegar. Then hunting for those eggs in my grandparents' backyard (there was always one hidden by the frog fountain) before a big British brunch where we consumed far more cholesterol than would be permitted nowadays.

In Belgium the eggs are chocolate, and finding them was a no-nonsense pursuit for the day's red-cheeked focal point, who went about the task with meticulous care and stalwart enthusiasm. (Suddenly I suspect she is an old soul who still holds pagan fertility symbols to be serious business.)

We also, appropriately enough, are taking care of the neighbors' pet for a week while they go skiing. The pet? A rabbit. Delivered the day before Easter. “Kijk! Een konijntje!”

A very happy Easter and/or Eostre Day to all of you.

Spring is here!

I caught a cold and am unemployed, so today I’m puttering around the house.  Both our pots are simmering sleepily on the stove (the wok has the night off), the kitchen is scrubbed, and I just vacuumed.  Cleaning under the bed I am amazed at what a hairy mammal I am (our dust bunnies are actually their taxonomic cousins, hair bunnies).

Puttering around being domestic is fun!  Women really had it made until feminism went and screwed it all up for them.

It’s been salaciously good weather lately.  Fondling breezes and licking sunshine, that type of thing.  Flowers showing up like popcorn when you put too many kernels in the pan and walked away.  (Just cooperate and pretend you cook your popcorn on the stove, please.)  Spring is in the air, suckers!  With weather this nice it is actually kind of embarrassing to have a cold.  It seems like a really lame joke, like CEO-at-the-annual-company-conference bad.  Or an anachronism, I’m sitting in commuter traffic in a covered wagon.  The cold dates to a previous era, which most people have moved away from.  Maybe it’s just kind of like wearing…at this point I would put in some laughably obvious fashion mistake of the late 90’s but unfortunately I’m fashion-blind.  Sorry.  Tapered jeans?

But Spring is here with a friendly vengeance and the Belgians are emerging from their brick caves, white legs under dusty shorts, pale collar bones over new summer dresses (which they started selling well before the weather actually warmed up).  Today marked the glorious return to my life of the sound of flip-flops against the bottoms of my feet, and I rousted out my favorite pair of shorts from their hibernation in my backpack up in the attic.

…mmm…  It was nice to see my backpack too…

Here's part of the downtown area of my Belgian stomping grounds.  My grass stains today were acquired on that grass, and my caffeine buzz in that terrace-cafe.

Flip flop flip flop.  Sounds good.

I wore the new Moroccan ones I bought in Fes last summer, and they stained a wide strip across the top of my foot a nice tannery chemical red.  I feel like using it to kick someone who goes on and on about the free market.  Does the free market keep businesses from staining your feet with who-knows-what chemical?  Nope.

K bought a mud facial mask thing in Marrakech too, which actually came from India, and I won’t let her use it.  It is just too easy to imagine it being full of lead, mercury, and…I dunno…pigeon shit (oh wait, that’s the tannery).  Am I being paranoid?  Racist?  Funny how those two go together so often.

But that tannery gunk soaked into my skin reminded me of the children hanging out in the streets around the tannery in Fes…  Please read it without even a trace of levity when I say that I want to work with an NGO to fight birth defects.

But I am getting way off track.  Sorry about that.  I have been utterly mentally constipated lately, hence no blogs, and I feel the need to just put something on here, for crying out loud.  I have tried a few times over the past few weeks and have nonsensical little half-files cluttering up my desktop.  That thing about the weather was the most coherent of the batch, but now I’ve gone and rambled off.

So I’m gonna throw this mess up on blogspot and go read in the sun.  Barefoot.  And that's cool with me.