Changes

I feel as though I’ve moved away from a picture that was far too close to my face. Before, I only could see blurs and dots of that picture. And now, that I’m away, it’s clear and in focus.

So, here is the revelation about my life:

I was being drained by predictibiltiy. Every single part of my old life, was just that, old. I was happy, content and in absolutely no danger of doing anything that really challenged me. And here, almost every moment has an element of the unknown. Most days I feel exhilerated, terrified, nervous, alive (and hot).

I never know if, when I wake up in the morning, water will come out of the tap. And so I am thankful and appreciative of water in a way I never was before. I conserve.

I don’t know if the car we have, which came with the land we bought and is almost as old as Riley, will start, or if I’ll have to push it down a hill and jump start it (something I never knew how to do before.) And so, in the morning when the engine comes to life, I am thankful.

I don’t know how long the power will stay on. But without fail, my electric alarm clock will be flashing in the morning. The power has never, not once stayed on all night long. So I am thankful for my watch and wind up flashlight.

When I go to the grocery store, there is no guarantee that the produce will be fresh, or if it’ll even be there! And so, when the truck has just come in, filled with mangoes, pineapple, avocado and lettuce (a luxury), I am thankful.

This strange combination of the unknown and gratitude has triggered a burst of creativity in all of us. The sounds are all new and in our minds could come from anything. The creatures that scurry past us could be an iguana or a frog or crab or, a monkey, like the one that ran across the road when Paul and I were driving the quad back from the beach.

Yesterday Riley captured a scorpion and Paul played basketball with a coconut! Steve has learned that clearing land is much easier with a machete than a chainsaw, that one kind of tree, when cut, releases thousands of stinging insects that live inside it’s trunk, and that tarantulas are less scary up close.

I am amazed at how small everything is here from the tiny bags of oatmeal to the gum packages that have only 4 pieces. Walking down the aisles of our tiny grocery store, I am reminded of sometime BEFORE my time, when people did their grocery shopping everyday, as I must now do to keep the fridge stocked. And even then, it’s never overflowing with packaged crap that sat in my cupboards for months in Toronto.


Despite this surge of loving the unknown, there’s a part of my brain that obviously still needs routine and I find myself reverting to Toronto references to life here. The roaring ocean at night reminds me of the DVP.I search for features in the faces of people I meet, noticing similarities to people I love back in Toronto. Wondering who will be my Sam, my Emily, my Laurisa.

The challenges aren’t all thrilling either. Some are downright frustrating. It has taken us weeks to try and get internet set up at this house. There have been a handful of trips to bigger town of Cobano (about 20 mintures away) Each time we go they tell us a different story of which documents we need to bring. We still don’t have it.

Our home, which we thought we were moving into by the end of February, won’t be ready now until (they say) the end of March. It’s painful to even be up there watching the crews work. As lovely as they are...paint dries faster.

And I’ve spent hours and hours trying to get our on-line banking in order. Dozens of emails, constantly changing passwords and still I am unable to transfer money.

Our rental house is rustic. When we went out for dinner the other night, the kids were so excited to sit on wooden chairs (all we have are plastic lawn chairs that could never be elevated to even “patio-set” status).

Riley misses TV and is re-learning how to actually play.
Eva says her friends here don’t like her as much as her friends in Toronto.
And Paul woke up crying in the middle of the night calling for Marivic.

But, every night at dinner when we go around the table doing “the good, the bad and the ugly”, something i tried to do in Toronto to find out what was going on with them at school, , the kids now squabble over who gets to go first to talk about what happened to them during the day. We are all feeling...what? I don’t know, everything. We are all feeling everything and I wouldn’t want it any other way.