In the Spirit of Christmas

Happy Holidays, folks!  The Christmas season is really upon us now, isn't it?  How does Christmas feel away?  

It really feels like... nothing.  

Every year around this time I do some pondering on the "feeling" of the holidays.  You're lucky enough to be able to go back and see what my thoughts were last year, as this blog is officially more than one year old! Anyway, this year I ponder the holidays from a totally new perspective-- the perspective of not participating.  

It's so weird.  What is so weird about it is that it's not weird at all (if that makes sense).  I keep forgetting it's almost Christmas.  If I were home, I would be in full-gear preparation mode, buying or making gifts, thinking about what food I am making for the gatherings and how we'll make it to both families's festivities.  I would be laboring over lists: what to buy for who, who to invite to a cookie-exchange (I swore last year that I'd have one this year-- goes to show how much life surprises you!), and writing out Christmas cards that would never make it to the mail.  These are the things I would be doing today, on the 17th of December (not to mention celebrating my dad's birthday-- HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD) if I were in Rockford right now. 

 Instead, every once in a while during a day I surprise myself randomly by thinking out of nowhere, "Huh! It's almost Christmas!"  

 

Despite the fact that we are only one week out from The Day, this morning was like any other lately.  I awoke in a haze, slightly grumpy after nursing Annika twice in the night and then being awoken by her incessant "MOMMY!" mixed with fuss-cries at 6 in the morning.  I groggily dragged my sulky body out of bed as my muscles tried to resurface from the slack slovenness that muscles experience only in the throes of deep sleep and fumbled across the room to haul her heavy body from bed.  Feeling like a cigarette (but I don't smoke anymore) I warmed up just ever so slightly to the day by hearing Jeremy downstairs knocking pots and pans around as the smell of coffee (my replacement addicton) wafted upward.  However, even after mawing down a Mary's Market vegetable muffin (miss you, Mary's!), toasty papas-- compliments of Jeremy, and slurping on some rich Costa Rican cafe con leche, I found myself irritable and aggrivated.  

I washed the dishes (dishes also follow you wherever you may go), swept the fireplace out, started the laundry( laundry follws you wherever you may go) and finally pushed my pasty self out into the sunshine, where I immediately started to feel better.  Annika and I tried to call the brown cow to the fence to eat some grass, we walked up and down the long driveway, we wound a grass crown around my head (she wouldn't wear it), and called "PEE-DOE, VENGA PEE-DOE!" (Pinto, come Pinto!).  It wasn't until about 10:00 this morning that I thought, while walking barefoot up the driveway, "huh, it's snowing in Rockford-- and it's almost Christmas."

Yes, as you imagine, Costa Ricans celebrate Christmas too, from colored lights and tinsel to Christmas trees and  fireworks (every night).  Christmas is as much a hullabaloo here as in most places.  But as tourists and loners, we are exempt.  Without snow, we have no Christmas spirit and the local holiday spirit doesn't really reach us outside the ads at the grocery store or the 25' Coca-Cola Christmas tree just outside San Jose.  

So this year we experience an existential version of Christmas and this year I understand that every experience is relative to a person's perspective.  A tradition that has been repeated every year for 27 years of my life is suddenly somehow absent and missing (but not missed) at the appointed time.  

But it's not completely gone.  We are still making plans for Christmas-- just not the typical plans. Without our friends and family, we have a lot of freedom in how we choose to celebrate this year.  So we have decided (quite wisely, methinks) to celebrate with some other of our relatives-- squirrel monkies-- on the beaches of the Pacific Ocean just west of here.  

I don't think we will do gifts-- although we might do something special for Annika, not sure what yet-- and there most certainly won't be a Christmas tree in our living quarters.  But we will wake together as a family Christmas morning and feel warm and cozy.  We will have something special in our hearts as we enjoy the holiday and think about all of you at home.  We will rub our eyes-- in a happy way this time-- and slip outside to sip refrescas de moras o naranjas on the beach, hiding our postres from the monkeys nearby while the sun spills down on our faces and the ocean water nibbles our toes.  

Now that's the Christmas Spirit I like!  Stress-free, cheap, and rewarding! Anyone want to join us?  I'll book you.

 

Bunk

Deadlines and Homework follow you wherever you may go too.

Sleeping in and Cookies for Breakfast

Vacation.

A time to relax and be with my favorite people, enjoy the world around me in its golden splendid glory, and take in all of the many amazing sights:

A bee courting a lily at the window

A bird of prey hovering mid-air before the plunge

A newly emerged butterfly unwrinkling its wing in the grass.

I am enjoying another work day as Jeremy and Annika traverse the city alone this morning.  Enclosed Annika's bed in a tent to keep the light out this morning and actually got to sleep until seven o'clock! 

HOO! 

Then we rolled out, made coffee and ate breakfast: egg and avacado on a corn tortilla, a banana and cookies.  To heck with it!  This is vacation, people!

People All Around Us

But very little intimacy.  I am beginning to understand the loneliness and isolation of immigrants. While we have the unique experience of getting to spend each and every day together as a family from sun-up to sun-down, I am beginning to miss the voices of others.  

Language barrier, it is called-- and rightly so because the inability to talk with anyone beyond casual greetings and simple chatter creates an invisible yet tangible wall between their lives and yours.  There are thousands and thousands of people around us every day.  We look down into their houses and yards and streets, we see their cars and motorbikes and children as we walk past daily; we encounter boys buying meat for their mothers at the shop down the road, we hear the owner bid them "tell your mami hello" but we are locked out of the intimacy, of the knowing, of the sending a greeting to a relation.  And it is lonely, in a strange way, to be around so many people and know no one.  There is a constant feeling of being conspicuously invisible: conspicuous because we look different than the locals and invisible because we are not part of their world but only passing through.

The strangest interactions create familiarity when humans cannot connect through words.  

A man on a horse pats my head three times.  

A prostitute beside us on the bus bonds with Annika.  Annika, being enamored with the black netting on the woman's arm and kept reaching out and stroking it so gently, saying "hmm," and "mmmm" empathetically (I don't know if she thought it was some kind of bandage or what?).   After the initial awkwardness of my child insisting on touching this woman's arm wore off, the woman took Annika's foot in her hand and tickled it softly while Annika relaxed and laid her head down on my chest. 

After the woman had gotten off at her stop Annika fussed and pointed to her foot, saying "more."

A gracious man at the farmer's market slowly and carefully explains how to eat the mysterious fruits at his stand and then compliments my Spanish (which is terrible, I feel, by now)

And Rigo, the landscaper here plays endlessly with Annika and the dogs, both shouting with joy in their own languages at each other and the dogs while laughing and running around.

There are so many things I want to know about life here.  What do the children do during the day?  Do most women stay home or do a lot of women work?  What do people eat for dinner at night and what time do they like to go to bed?  How many people go to church and what is the divorce rate?  What are their pet-peeves with their government and politicians? What organizations and causes do people here support? Who travels and where? 

But I am locked into my usual "which way is the bus stop?" or "do you sell aspirin?" 

I am learning a lot about what it means to be an outsider-- sometimes it means being unable to find out what you want to know at all. 

Blank

Writer's block follows you wherever you may go.

Out in the World

We are here in Costa Rica and we are having the time of our lives.  After just a few days we are falling into the routine-- early rising but late departing, slow but decided traveling interspersed with patchwork conversations in Spanish, lots of cooking, little spending, and a wealth of experience.  

We are living about half-way up a mountain in a house that overlooks Escazu and San Jose and we are looked-over by Tiquicia, the mountain-top community.  Yesterday, we walked down the mountain in the rain to see something of the city and today we walked up.  Yesterday traffic increased to a nerve-wracking and constant zoom of trucks, taxis and cars as we descended (pedestrians do not have the right-of-way here in Costa Rica and the roads are very small with no sidewalks in many places) and the smell of food cooking, car exhaust, and general human activity filled our nostrils.  Today on our hike upwards traffic all but stopped completely when the high roads became unnavigable paths, the people were most scarce and spread out, all busy within their occupations solitarily picking berries from coffee trees nestled in mountainside groves, or slowly ascending a path home with a sac or basket in hand.   One woman sorted bottles for recycling in her kitchen and two men worked a tomato and pepper farm under long strips of plastic that create a greenhouse.  Some invisible people called down from a neighboring mountainside dense with vegetation.  Who knows what work they were doing.  

We met various tios, tias, una mama, muchos amigos, y primos y primas of the people working and living where we are staying; we made awkward and choppy conversation in Spanish and then rehashed the conversations later in English.  Almost everyone has been very nice-- all except a taxi driver who tried to swindle us for not even taking us anywhere the other day!  

It's worth mentioning that since we've been here the three of us have eaten about six avacados, a load of beans and rice, fresh local huevos bought at room temperature and home-made tortillas from a vendor down the road.  We have also been drinking local coffee.

It's also worth mentioning that I have seen a species of hummingbird that I do not recognize at all, several butterflies and birds that I have never seen, a ton of lush floral vegetation that I have no name for (I feel like an infant sometimes in this country!)  Even as I have been sitting here writing this post we had a species emergency.  We both had to drop everything to stand at the window and gawk at a flock of about 50 bright green parrots or parakeets swooping around just outside of the house.  Vultures are regular patrolers of our view, some bright blue bird likes to play in a tree in the yard, and we've even seen the occasional seagull, even though there are no beaches around here.  Our environment is a caucophany of birdsong day and night which mingles with the goat bleeting, dog barking, and occasional cow-moo of the other local creatures.  

Somehow electricity and city water make it all the way up here.  Any higher, in Tiquicia, for example, there is still electricty but instead of city water, huge trucks haul up to fill tanks in people's yards .  How the people at the top get water?  No se.  Although I have to say that I have been constantly amazed at the wide variety of trucks, buses, and manual-shift vehicles that negotiate the perilous steeps all day long.  I wouldn't be surprised if water trucks somehow do make it to the top.  From my window I shake my head as I see long buses and weighed-down trucks huffing slowly upward, practically perpendicular to the tiny road they drive on.  I am equally amazed at how fast the local boys speed down the same tiny roads on their motorbikes, whipping around no-visibility turns without the slightest hesitation, even knowing that they might be rudely greeted by the grill of a truck or bus.  

This is where I feel at home.  Even though I feel completely conspicuous, totally naive and utterly inept at communicating, I feel at home where I get to see another culture in action.  I am constantly wondering and speculalting about people's lives, histories, futures, and passions.  I feel totally invigorated by the challenge of making sense out of a culture that I do not understand.  I revel in the paradoxes and desire to know more and more.  

I know this will be a great vacation; I know it will be too short.

Pura Vida!

I Like Paying Taxes

Benjamin Franklin:

“I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”