Photos of a New Year

Much needed rain fell from the skies in torrents last week. Drivers were discombobulated; the rock hard earth was flooded. This week sunshine has returned, the earth has absorbed the moisture, the kids are back in school, and I've spent a couple days cleaning house, getting it back into ordinary time condition.

It was a good vacation punctuated by many happy moments.  Since I don't have much time to share, I'll just post a few happy photos highlighting the beginning of the year.

Reenacting Juan Cabrillo's discovery of Southern California

With the grandparents

The boys

Squinting at the camera trying to spy sea life.

Running!

Mission San Diego

St Junipero Serra is feeling flush after the holidays.

A cute baby Jesus and St. Anthony

Camellias in bloom. Love this pink.

Learning chant.

The girls

Waiting for sunset

Trying to capture a triple jump

Leap of faith

Good night light.

In which mother and daughter read about mother and daughters reading

Happy Feast of St. Rita – our village’s patroness. The church is hosting a fiesta this weekend with the traditional na' taotao tumano to follow.  We went to a high school graduation party last weekend and the food was never ending, so I assume there will be plenty to eat here. Our dive instructor, who is not a small guy, said he lived for a month without buying food when he was single. I asked if that was because he was eating coconuts and mangoes.  No, he said, he just kept going to rosaries and fiestas. He'd show up near the end and bring home balutin, or leftovers. 

Here's a description of the fiesta from the local paper:

OUR VILLAGE GOALS

• Revive the tradition and celebration of our patron Saint, “St. Rita” that has been part of our village identity since the original people of Sumay Bay were relocated there during World War II.
• Invite local and foreign people to partake in a weekend of music, games, food, and good Guam vibes for all ages.
• Remind and inspire our community the importance of keeping these village traditions alive.

FEATURES AND ENTERTAINMENT

• Fiesta Sponsored by Host (Fiesta Food/Drinks)
• Classic/Custom Car & bike show
• Live Entertainment with Guam’s top Music and Dance Performers
• Sponsor & Raffle give-aways
• Live Cultural Performances
• Saturday Night Movies in the Out-Field
• Cock Fight displays

We’ve been reading a selection from Saints for Young Readers for Every Day every morning, and from it the kids were startled to hear that Rita prayed for the death of her sons to prevent them from avenging their father’s murder and becoming murderers themselves. She didn’t want them to go to Hell, I told the kids. But a part of me wonders why she didn’t pray for their conversion, instead of their death. A troubling story. Is this a story of extreme love – that a mother prays for her children to die rather than suffer eternal hell? Makes me think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the baby is killed to avoid suffering slavery. But isn’t this the thinking behind abortion? “I’d rather my child avoid suffering…” One of the things I enjoyed in Simcha’s Fisher’s chapter in Style, Sex and Substance was the reminder that we have to let our children go and make their own mistakes, if they must. It was a timely read, as we are beginning to see our teens asserting their independence.

So while the older boys are pulling away, the nine year old and I have had a string of bonding moments. First there was the trip to my grandmother’s funeral, and now we are reading The Mother-Daughter Book Club books by Heather Vogel Frederick.  My daughter picked one up at the library and read it before I had a chance. While they aren’t great literature, and there’s more talk of boyfriends and fashion than I normally would care for, they have a tone of refreshing innocence. And we are actually talking about books!

Our library only has the last two, so the girls in the book club are in 8^th grade and 9^th grade. Some of them are interested in boys and fashion, but beyond some mistletoe kisses, there’s nothing heavy. And I love all the quotes from the books that begin the chapters and are interspersed in the narrative, showing how clearly books and life intersect.

In the first one we read, Pies and Prejudice, (the titles initially turned me off checking them out myself) the girls read Pride and Prejudice, and one of the girls moves to England. My daughter was tickled that I picked it up to read after her and enjoyed it. And I’m tickled to think she’s beginning to discover an interest in things Anglo.  She even has mentioned starting a mother-daughter book club.

The second book we read is actually the last in the series. In Home for the Holidays, the girls read the Betsy Tacy books. Like Emma, the bookworm in the club, I haven’t ever read these books. They weren’t at my library when I was growing up. But now my curiosity is piqued, and I’m going to hunt some down. Some of the details mentioned make me wonder if I’ll really like them – Betsy may be too boy and party crazy.  But I love quotes like this: “Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.” And from the descriptions in this book, I wonder if Betsy’s experience of her world is similar to my grandmother’s growing up years, with her social clubs and parties.

Since finishing these books, while waiting for me to decide whether to buy the next or for the library to get more, my daughter has moved on to The Penderwicks, which is thrilling because I loved it so much. More to share!

Briefly noted

Some Halloween fun: a Chamorro ghost tale about the Taotaomo'na. The new spin in this story is that it hunts out foreigners. What we've been told and read in our Folk Legends of the Marianas Islands book is that this spirit protects the woods.  One story is that if you want to see one, you rub dog doo in your eye.  If you don't want to see one, you let the steam from rice come in your face.  They don't like perfume, and if you do something they don't like, they pinch your arm hard enough to leave a bruise. Someone else said you have to ask the taotaomo'na permission before peeing in the forest. Or at least say "Excuse me."

A video of Guam. Not sure why the reverse footage is included.  Both of these works I found on the website of the University of Guam's student newspaper, Triton's Call. But for mi familia, this is what we're looking at.

For those of you who have heard that the brown tree snake is a problem here (they have decimated the bird population, including the flightless koko bird.), here's a photo to show that the boys are doing their part to rid the island of these imported pests.. Just helping out the USDA which is paying big bucks to trap them with mice in little cages.

This is my friend the cane toad, another foreigner.  Taotaomo'na doesn't need to pinch him because his relatives are squashed all over the roads. We've been having great lessons in anatomy from the roadkill. 

Does this count as school work? I sort feel extra credit is due to the 7 year old for the artistic photography.

Below, another son hard at work at homework, beneath his father's handiwork: lofts a step above college dorm room quality.

We recently puppy-sat for this little poodle.  I have harbored prejudices against poodles, a prejudice rooted in my family's deep suspicion of small dogs.  But this little guy was awfully lovable. He hasn't replaced our labrador in my heart, but we all felt a little bereft when his owners came home and took him back. It was gratifying when we saw him on a walk the other day, and he scrambled over in excitement to see me. I was glad he didn't puddle on my shoe.

Although this is more than seven quick takes, here is another attempt at catching the sunset from across our front yard:

See Jen at www.conversiondiary.com for more.

Beautiful morning

Our house is not in a pretty neighborhood. Behind our house is a state building that used to be a small hospital. Now it is where the water police park their boats. Around the corner, a couple blocks down is the military hospital, which has a large expansion project under construction. We hear trains at night. And although we have a view of the Back Bay to the north, it is marred by the high rise casino a mile down the street and the highway bridge that cuts across the bay to connect our little peninsula to the mainland. That view wouldn’t matter so much, if the neighborhood weren’t suffering from a decline because insurance rates went crazy after Katrina. People can’t keep up with their bills and their yards and exteriors. Those who can afford to move have, and those who can’t sell their homes rent them to the kind of people who keep pit bulls for pets.

But this morning on my run I saw:

blue jays
green herons
white egrets
tawny killdeer or plover
brown pelicans
black cormorants
gray mourning doves
diving seagulls and terns
chattering mockingbirds
cavorting swallows
and a pair of redheaded woodpeckers making a nest.

There’s also a pair of osprey who nest nearby. Sometimes we see them circling when we’re swimming in the neighbors’ pool.

Then I saw a baby opossum and its mama, playing possum. For the first time I thought they looked cute, their faces frozen in mirror images of each other. Their ruse worked; I didn’t attack.


Finally, in a vacant lot, I saw what I thought at first was a muskrat. It, too, seemed frozen, so I detoured over to get a closer look. As I neared, it slithered into motion – it was actually a mink! A limp indicated it had either an injury or rabies to spread to the pitbulls.


The critters all are feeding on the ripe mulberries and low growing blackberries that are ripe right now in the vacant lot behind the military hospital.

Beauty is where you look for it.

Post in which I learn about southern culture.

I learned a new word yesterday: a friend was telling me how she catechized a Protestant friend by saying that “The Catholic Church is the Christian Church with a little lagniappe” – a little something extra.

Keeping with the theme of integrating into the south, I made my first pot of gumbo yesterday. I know it’s not authentic because I started with roux from a jar and put the rice in the pot, not on the side. I did this because I don’t like to wash extra dishes and because the Cajun sausage I used was so darn hot I needed to down a beer to douse the flames and the rice to soak up the heat. Maybe I should have tasted the soup before I added some Slap Your Mama and hot sauce. Tiana never would have done that. But my husband loved it even if none of the kids did!

Southern Styles

In college, my husband studied architecture in a prestigious classical program. He passed on some of his knowledge to me, so now I know a little of the vocabulary of architecture. On one of my running routes, I pass a number of new construction projects. Here is what they say to me:

"Welcome to my Marriott."

"Welcome to Southern Living."

"Welcome to the Brady Bunch."

.

Okay, this isn't new construction. This is what we rented. Its modern lines spoke to us of easy clean-up and the right price. So we sacrificed on looks.

Winter comes to the South

“I wonder why someone has lined rocks up along the edge of the bay?” I thought when I saw the white line along the low water line. On closer inspection I realized it was ice forming a break line on the shore.

Every conversation and local radio broadcast from the past few days has begun with a discussion of the cold weather. Our landlord called to ask us to wrap the hose spigots in towels and plastic bags. The kids didn’t go outside for recess all week. The stores have had a run on hats and gloves.

Having spent the first 20 some years of my life north of the Mason-Dixon line, I want to scoff at all these soft southerners who are getting so worked up about temps in the teens and twenties. During the day the highs are in the 40s, so the freeze isn’t even sustained through the day. This is nothing, I want to say. As a teenager in the Midwest, I would go out for runs and come home with my nostrils frozen and my scarf stiff and crunchy with frozen condensation. When we lived north of Chicago, I kept an extra supply of hats, gloves and scarves, a blanket, and a foldaway snow shovel in the back of the car just in case we got caught somewhere. I regularly wore two pairs of socks. We kept a basket of boots by the back door, so the kids could go out and skate on the puddle that froze over the low spot in the back yard.

I want to tease these Southerners who have wrapped their palm trees and tropical plants in sheets and tarps and Saranwrap. But gosh darnit, I’m too cold.

Local Color

I should point out that there is more than one thing to smile about around this place. Yesterday it was passing a sign on a stripmall storefront church that advertised the preaching of "Juan 'the prophet' O'Neill." I'm sure he gives a good sermon.

And today it was the guy sitting on a cooler at the bottom of the highway exit ramp holding up a ratty cardboard sign that read, "Why lie? I need $$ for beer."

And I'm guessing why people keep their coolers out on their front porches: They really stink after being loaded up with fresh fish and shrimp.

Interlopers

Today another military wife who grew up just a couple hours away asked if I felt like we were settling in. We have now lived in this house for 2 whole months. We have pictures on the walls. I have found places to shop other than Walmart. I've figured out a few routes to run. But I still feel like a newcomer.

Is it because I'm from the north and this is the deep south? I'm really midwestern and have more in common with the people here than those on the east coast, where we had been living for 4 years. Is it because it is so darn hot and humid here? It gets hot enough back home to smell alfalfa cooking, a sweet smell of summer.

Maybe it is because I feel sad driving around here. So many homes boarded up (hurricane shutters or washed out windows?), yards grown over with weeds, rusted out cars and old coolers parked out front. There isn't really an urban center because it was washed away by Katrina. The devastation of that storm is still plainly evident four years later, and I feel a little guilty when I complain about this place. The proportion of destruction is difficult to imagine. Perhaps more difficult to understand is why people came back. Why rebuild multimillion dollar casinos on the beach, daring another storm to destroy them? Do they make that much money? The perseverence of the people is awe-inspiring, but their daring is even more surprising. Perhaps because I dug up my own roots and moved on, became a displaced person by choice, I wonder why not resettle somewhere safer. But then what place is really safe?

Yesterday afternoon, we spent an hour driving around trying to find a little trail I had read about in a magazine. When the whining of the kids had finally convinced us to head home, we suddenly came upon the trail head, just a few miles down from the casinos. We all hopped out and walked the short trail. We surprised small lizards, giant grasshoppers (looking like they were painted by Walter Anderson, a local artist, my son pointed out), a moth that hovered and flitted like a hummingbird, and a marsh grown over with pitcher plants, an orchidlike plant I didn't recognize, and a vivid red lily. I plan to buy a Gulf Coast plant identification book. I want to go back with my camera. A connection to this place has formed. Now I just need to take the time to eat a good po'boy.

P.S. After a little searching, I think what I thought was an orchid is really the blossom of the pitcher plant.

From arbolz