Peace of the Pie

In June 2010, I quit my job so I could bike around Europe for the summer. I planned to return to San Francisco in September. 'Sure the economy's rough,' I figured, 'but I'll find something.'

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Home Invasion

Everything new, whether it is a new jacket, a new computer, or even a new house, eventually loses the excitement of newness. Lines and cracks start to show, functions fail, luster fades. Even if the ‘new thing’ continues to serve its purpose without flaw, as B.B. King said, the thrill is gone. The only possible exception, if you’re lucky, is with a new person, but that’s another subject for another time.

I still love my house, I’m still proud of it, but the honeymoon is over. It’s time to get down to the day-to-day realities of paying bills and arguing over what to watch at night. The house lost its innocence rather all at once. I was gone for four days at a meeting, and when I came back I found that some food had been taken. My house hadn’t exactly been broken into as much as reached into. Not really a big deal, even in the small scheme of things, but certainly a bit of a downer. The next day I was outside, peeling otoi, which is a kind of root, for dinner, when I heard a plastic bowl fall inside the house. I thought a malevolent chicken had had the nerve to come in – more on their ubiquity later – and had knocked something over. I went in and found my plastic mixing bowl on the ground but no chicken. I picked it up and turned to put it back on the top shelf where it goes. There, coiled up on one of the crossbeams, was a bright yellow snake, which has grown through constant retellings to the size of the snake from the Jungle Book, but which was probably about six feet long. Before I could act, he slithered in that uniquely evil way known only to snakes up into my roof, which is where this picture was taken. Now, the first snake I saw (mentioned two or three posts ago) was kinda fun. Kitschy almost. He was nowhere near my house nor me. And I got a good story out of it. But this latest snake is a co-resident, and it makes feeling my way around in the dark a much more harrowing prospect. When I told my friends here about it, they laughed at my fear (not cool) and told me not to worry. This type of snake was only looking for rats, they said, and once he had eaten all of them he would leave. That, to me, seems like an awful lot of lemons to turn into lemonade. While this information was more comforting than finding out that the snake was poisonous, I still feel like there must be a better way to take care of a rat problem.

Nothing since has matched the drama of that snake, but the foibles and challenges of living in a thatch-roofed, dirt-floored house continue daily. The closest structure to my house is Florentino’s chicken coop, around which about forty chickens roam all day with nothing to do but pop out eggs. A fair number of these flightless ornithipeds regularly choose my house for their hangout, so I’m treated to constant clucking and unwanted landscaping. A quick note to dispel the romantic myth of the once-a-day, sunrise cockadoodledoo: yes, the ‘rooster crows at the break of dawn,’ as Dylan sang, but he also crows at whatever hour all the livelong day. Sometimes he crows at the break of three o’clock in the morning, something ole Bob neglected to mention probably because it doesn’t rhyme with ‘I’ll be gone.’ Their dumb, unblinking, glassy eyes make them look ripe for brainwashing, so I’m hoping to spread the word in the chicken community that Adam’s house=double plus ungood. So far no dice.

I’ll end with more of an upbeat anecdote, still keeping with the theme, since this post has been primarily me complaining. The rain has started. Everyday around noon the clouds roll in and it usually rains for a few hours in the afternoon. When they told me here that there are only two seasons, summer and winter (dry and wet), I nodded but believed that there were probably in between seasons that they didn’t acknowledge. But clouds were a rarity one week, and rain came daily the next. It was quick, as was my education on the art of trench digging. I dug a few channels when it was dry, but there is no way to simulate hundreds of gallons of falling water, and the next thundershower proved my ignorance. As my dirt floor turned to mud, I grabbed a shovel, stripped down to shorts, and met the beast head on. It was a muddy good time. And, at least these last few days, the house has stayed dry. For the most part. There are a few holes in my roof, but Florentino assures me we can fix those. But he was also supposed to meet me here at the co-op at 8 and it’s 11:30. So we’ll see about the roof.

I’ve been living in my house now for more than two months, in Cerro Iglesia for six, and in Panama for eight and a half. Whoa.