It's pouring here. The rain is coming down in sheets, an unwavering torrent, God's unending rain stick. But don't stop your imagination there. Thunder echoes across the whole valley, seeming to be right overhead no matter where you stand, coming down like an acoustic load of bricks. And lightning, flashing through the green and white plastic roof, sending digital hiccups through the computer screen. The rain grows quiet, almost fading into the background, subsumed under the light Guatemalan guitar music coming from the front of the cafe. Then BOOMSSH and the rain begins its crescendo, rising, pouding on the roof, splashing full in the cobblestone streets. Experience over the last week tells me it will be over within the hour, becoming intermittent over the afternoon into evening, allowing us mortals to rally and group together for a Saturday night. Blessed rain gods know how to put on a show.
For reasons I am still just grasping at, it has been a low key week. Things seem to be settling, even though nothing is settled. Listless, bound for a port whose name and location has been smudged into oblivion. This is the kind of situation I hate: not knowing where to go next, confronted with endless mediocre options, separated from the people closest to me, faced with the fact that no matter how little I do today tomorrow will still arrive just as quick. Apollo does not wait on me. And yet...the other shoe has not dropped. Would it be too much of a metaphor-stretch to say that "it is still tied tightly onto my foot"? I would leave it out, but there's no accounting for taste. I will let my Venerable Readers choose for themselves. Go on, choose.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching English this week. I can't say I was the most organized teacher, as most of my "lesson plans" were devised on the two-minute walk from my office to the classroom. Regardless, I think I restored some enthusiasm to English classes -- when I began the week the students all groaned "No English!" when they learned my purpose in the class, but by the end of the week they had removed the "No" and turned their groans into simple statements of fact. Success is relative. We did a bunch of vocabulary exercises, and then I played boys vs. girls games with the older kids (around 13-15) and did drawings with the younger kids (around 7-9). Office work was good too, although not quite as invigorating as the previous week. I am in the process of creating some new projects to re-infuse myself with enthusiasm. On that note: Is it actually possible to "re-infuse" something or someone? I don't see why not, but I have not actually ever heard that conjunction before. Just a thought.
Another sad goodbye this week, this time to my English doctor friend, she is off to work at a hospital a few hours away. The other guy who moved into our house will be leaving on Monday, and with only a few days next week with my young Canadian friend, I may be left alone. A recipe for disaster? O una receta para exito? Only Time will tell...
This morning, when it was still brightsunnyhot, I went for a nice, long walk. Walked to the end of a road in a small town a few miles outside Antigua. Some kids were playing soccer with a plastic red ball. A few men were putting together the foundations of a concrete house. A woman sat out on the step with her small child, both squinting at me as I walked by. The road ended there, and so I walked back from whence I had come, and ran into some bolos -- Guatemalan for drunks. After a short discussion with them, I continued on to a park of ruins near the Antigua bus "station" (actually just a big dusty lot which smells of burnt oil and cancer). The park, on the other hand, was beautiful. Once upon a time there was a huge monastery there, a monastery which collapsed during one or several earthquakes many centuries ago. Enormous chunks of brick and stone had fallen during the earthquake(s), and there they remain, littering the main courtyard and scattered around the park. I strolled quietly through the empty, ceiling-less rooms, the ground covered with hard moss and the walls scratched with grafitti. For a while there was no one else, and then I ran into a family playing soccer in one of the spaces in the back. And then there were two teenagers making out in the main courtyard, pressed against a fifty-ton fallen chunk. I regret not bringing my camera, I will go back and get some pictures before I leave.
Which will be......
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We've had a lot of rain, too. But no drama -- just a ceaseless sussurating sogginess, too lazy for anything but gravity. It has nearly drowned my captive basil, now pale from root rot. Tomatoes have lost their warmth and huddle together on emptying shelves at Samaha's. Only the geese grow in number.
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