two days of summer.

We did it! Packed, cleaned and cleared out the house. It wasn't until after we moved into the waiting area for the plane that I cried. There's something more final about leaving Patagonia. When I left the States, I might have choked up a time or two, but it never felt final. Of course I would return to visit--if not to live.

Puerto Natales is where S + I met, where we started a life together, where we've been living the past few years with the odd support system of other expats and a few locals. Our comfort, our makeshift family. And now another leap into the wide open. (Let's not even think about the part where we become parents.) This next leap we make together. Yeah, we can face anything.

{photo by rishi menon}

We arrived to Santiago last night. It was windy cold when we left Patagonia, so the green spring blooms and magnolia trees outside our window now are a welcome change. We can walk around outside in flip flops and T-shirts. Sunshine's so good for the heart. Never mind the smog; on the way in we could see an outline of the Andes. Today we're off to enjoy the summer before we head back into winter--again.

{photo by pilottage}

For the past few years, we've been smartly following summer, not winter. This works out well, because Patagonian summers are on par with California winters. Sun sets in Santiago nearly two hours before it does in the extreme south of the country, so it's a good transition to moving into dark before five. Dear Nordic friends, I don't know how you manage near total darkness for months at a time! For now, we're off to soak in the sunshine.

postcards fade to blue.

This afternoon I'm in a tall hot pink hostel, two stories of corrugated tin siding, typical of most buildings in Natales. I'm waiting for my students to show up. Well, not waiting, enjoying. Sitting in a plush velvety seat to take a wee rest while I scan, again, the huge postcard collection here.

Perhaps there are hundreds of postcards here, rows hanging from ceiling to floor, shoddily stapled together. They dangle against a backdrop of a blue and yellow painted wall, the colors split by a strip of wallpaper border. Giant full-lipped suns intersperse cherub-faced crescent moons looking down beatifically at the yellow stars and one audaciously ringed Saturn, patterned over and over.

Over and over the past few weeks, I've come to realize the blueness of postcards. Predominantly. I'm not sure if it's due to sun bleaching, time, an obsession with sky, the lasting nature of blue or something about the postcard industry's azure draw.

Sure, there's the odd red and white Canadian flag; an Ohio triptych within a red & white frame flaunting old barns; the mauve-blue of D.C. lit up at dusk; a rainbowed 1980s thank you!; one of the royal couples wearing red and black; citrus sunsets; a concrete Hamburg from above (framed again in red & white); Holland: red poppies, orange horizons, blue-green A frames, white & black windmills, yellow "traditional dress," and happy cows chewing their cud in green pastures; Vienese gothic cathedrals and brown bakery goods. Grenoble, San Francisco, Australian koalas, so many Patagonias and Antarcticas, Berlins, Brazils, Wales, La Paz & Hong Kong, the Blue Angels, Stockholm, the Taj Majal and Catalina Island--all doused in a prevailing blue.

It's been about 40 minutes, today's class a no-go. But I sense a postcard exchange on the horizon. Mail here is slow and has been unreliable in the past. But nothing's been lost for a while, and the idea of sending and receiving mail throughout this bitter cold (for me!) winter warms my heart. Funny, just today I also stumbled across The Benevolent Postcard Society, a little too late, but what a beautiful idea!

So, send me your address, even if you think I already have it! xoxo

oh, beautiful cello, beautiful morning.

This morning, in our heated and currently sunlit living room, I'm waiting for my students to arrive. I'm listening to Bach's Cello Suites (in case anybody does show), as classical music is supposed to aid in learning and info retention.

I've been teaching English classes to two groups of hostel and other small-business owners. My good friend Laura, who teaches ESL for a living has given me lots of tips. I've been able to use some of them, but because of the odd grouping of people and level of interest, it's hard to get a good routine going. The groups are small, and sometimes nobody shows up at all.

It's a pretty unnatural situation, because the students are only taking the classes to earn a grant from the government. The process requires that they receive training/take classes in the areas of their choosing. And although my students have chosen to learn English, they don't really want to. Well, at least not the majority of my first class. One has even told me on numerous occasions that she essentially has no desire to learn and is only participating in the courses in order to get plata (dinero) from the government.

Needless to say, these sessions can be disheartening and raucous. Often the students just don't show up. My morning class was in one of the hostel-owners hostels, but it has recently, for various reasons that don't have anything to do with me, moved to our house. I didn't make this decision, but I am definitely benefiting from it. I can be warm, teach without wearing my puffy jacket, and when nobody shows for the first hour of class (each class is a whopping three hours long), at least I can still work and be productive in some other capacity, instead of just shivering and waiting. Plus in the end, each student is only required to complete 50% of the coursework or hours attended. No es nada. So, after this week, only the people who have missed several classes already, will have to continue coming to class, and most of the morning group plans to complete the bare minimum as far as I can tell.

In nicer news, the second group of students have more ganas to learn. They attend classes more regularly, so I can actually do fun things with them. We've drawn self-portraits and baked chocolate chip cookies (in English) and had a blast doing it. When you have three hours to fill, something has to be creative about it.

labyrinths & lupines & thanks

This morning, with sun and nothing pressing to do, I looked up information on creating labyrinths. While tracing or planting our own labyrinth is not the most practical of things for us to do, especially outdoors and in this pretty bad and typically cold weather, it is something I want to create one day.

Lately I’ve been reading, hearing, overhearing or witnessing people tell one another: That is so you! Sometimes this is addressed to me, other times it’s something general and in the air… I’ve been wondering what this means with more intensity recently, because I haven’t really been feeling like myself. I wonder what that even means? Who am I, really? And who are you? And are we really different?

Instead of identifying, and thus strongly attaching, ourselves to certain ephemera: interests, likes, personality traits, states of being, etc., aren’t we supposed to be trying to transcend all this stuff? I imagine a lot of people may disagree with such a view and decide it kind of airy. But what I mean is, the more names, designations and identity traits we tape to ourselves, the more bound we are to things that don’t really matter… not in the end. (Here I imagine someone completely wrapped up in duct tape of varying colors and snug beneath pieces of paper with lots of nouns and adjectives—no verbs, unable to move.)

The more we try to differentiate ourselves from and disown each other, the further we get from the truth. Which lies, I believe, somewhere more in the realm of union. We like bad news and gory details, mostly because we are capable of such things. We like to complain or talk smack, because we prefer to distance ourselves from certain people, behaviors and ways of living. But all that really does is sow negativity seeds into our hearts. The seeds, of course, work as magnets, so we end up attracting exactly what we claim to abhor (or at least dislike).

How we label ourselves happens consciously and subconsciously, and we tend to make the labels negative or positive, instead of accepting ourselves and the things around us as they are. In this way, even the “positive” carries an implied “negative” charge with it.

So what does this have to do with me not feeling myself. There’s something bluer these days and so much more earthbound. I’ve been feeling frustrated lately, and fighting against this frustration instead of… well, embracing it as the fleeting thing that it is. Everyone feels sad or far away or discombobulated or aggravated sometimes. But fighting with our emotions usually has the effect of honing them, knife-sharp. And since it’s hard not to succumb to knives, we spiral further into this place and begin to identify with our emotions, and so they grow.

Lucky for me, Serkan stays patient and is more of a problem-solver than a problem-maker. He tells me exactly what I would say to me if I could at said moment. And since I say similar things to other people , I am able to listen to him. He talks to the part of me that knows I’m being a fool, not to the part that is in the middle of being dramatically foolish.

This morning I was looking for labyrinths, some activity on a path inward and back out again. Breathing. Full of breath and thanks. Since the sun was shining, Serkan and I went for a bike ride on the muddy dirt roads. We visited our land and planted lupines in a line along one side of the property. Two chubby, super cute, but overwhelmingly urine-scented, puppies accompanied us. In a year or so, the lupines will start flowering and seeding, whether we’re here to see them or not.

pictures of our lives at breakfast.

We’ve been eating breakfast for hours. It’s our first day back to Natales with the ability to sleep in instead of run around collecting stamps of denial all over Santiago. Now that we’re sure we’ll be here through the winter and then some, we’re settling in. And what better way to feel at home than to purchase… small household appliances? Yay! We are now the proud owners of a quick-boil electric kettle, a hand-held electric beater (making batter for anything will be so much easier!) and a toast/waffle iron with three different hotplates. The waffle hotplate is my personal favorite. And toast (tost), a simple panini sandwich, is really common in Turkey, for breakfast or for a quick ‘snack’ whenever.

This morning, and afternoon as you can see from the time, we used all three of these handy devices :)


Spiced Italian espresso started this morning’s breakfast madness. I make it sound fancier than it really is, because we drink that every morning. Ingredients and digressions: 1.) Coffee (which horrifyingly contains sugar! It’s difficult and expensive to find real sugar-free coffee grounds here.) 2.) Two whole cardamom seeds (a gift from one of Serkan’s Turkish friends living in Vienna, where we stayed for a few nights. We could hardly communicate, but I was really excited about the cardamom, so she sweetly sent us off with a couple of bags when we left.) 3.) Cinnamon stick shavings and/or 1-2 clove spikes (called clavo del olor, which can translate directly to ‘scented nails.’). We usually drink this espresso concoction more like a coffee, with added water, heated milk and a small dollop of honey. On morning that I breakfast alone, this is my breakfast.

A small bowl of cereal and fruit accompanied our coffees, and then I got to work on the waffle batter, from scratch of course, because Aunt Jemima (ick!) and Krusteaz (yum!) don’t live here. While the waffles cooked, we brewed some yummy small leaf tea, which Serkan was able to find in Punta Arenas. I sauteed some peaches and bananas with some honey to top the waffles. The rest of the waffles, we slathered with my cousin Kevin’s famous apple butter, almond butter from Trader Joe’s (both of which my aunt sent down with Tim when he came to visit; thanks guys!!!), currant-strawberry jam (handmade by me, my first attempt at such a thing), and spiced peach jam (handmade by Serkan). Even though we were way finished eating and drinking, I thought we should take some pictures of all this goodness, so I made us some Turkish coffees, threw the last of the batter into the iron and we had a little photo shoot.

Our Magellanic stove that soots up and heats the house. Turkish style double kettle for tea and coffee pot (cezve).


Kevin's apple butter & almond butter, thanks to my dear family and Tim, who brought it down here!


The super cute Turkish coffee cups we bought in Samsun, Turkey. A man and a woman sitting on big hearts blowing little heart bubbles to each other.

Arbitrarily speaking

The truth is so many interesting things are happening every moment. Right now: The wind whipping loose cables against the house, pushing the clouds at such speed. Within one minute sun turns to shadow; it rains; returns sun. The windows shutter. A cieling board leading up to an uncrawlable crawlspace lifts up and lands back askew on the rafters. The swinging door in the kitchen sways and creaks. Gusts lash through the tin chimenys; the stoves inside vibrate a little.

Unfortunate plastic bags tatter through the streets, sticking to trees and fenceposts. A red bug, tinier than a pinpoint, hurries down the white wall, tracing loose esses. These must be the types of bugs--in large quantities--they used to dye wool, anciently. Someone writes all this down, abritrarily.

Elsewhere a couple commences their first kiss. Someone is on fire or dreaming of flying salmon. Looks up phoenix in the dictionary. Cries for loneliness or a wedding. Hides under the bed. Gives birth. Is born. Dies. Looks in the mirror and sees a stranger. Starts their first day of work. Avoids an accident on the road. Saves a life on the river. Writes a difficult letter to a friend. Stares out the window instead of the hard monitor. An orange striped cat stares back--halted. Takes a few steps, looks back, locks eyes. Continues this along an entire fenceline, so that one cannot even leave her future gaze.

Visit us while the skies are blue

...and while we are still here! This is a small photo post, because I finally have an internet connection fast enough to post pics! My photo-taking skills are sorely lacking, but it's on my list of things to learn, as is Turkish, Photoshop and knitting.

A few clear-day photos from Torres del Paine, doing the usual W trek...

Typical Patagonian skies, on a clear day.


Base of the Towers on a crazy calm windless day.


Los Cuernos at night with a bit of moon.


And a couple more photos from our land. Yes, it's true. Just like real adults, we have bought a slice of the Patagonian pie. It's half a hectare just outside of Puerto Natales in a sector referred to as Los Huertos. Beautiful views of several mountain ranges and of the fjord (if you build two stories). We don't have any plans to do anything with it. We're just hoping to have an asado fiesta there (or my other idea is some sort of sunworshipping rave, but that looks doubtful). For now it's a great place to play frisbee, especially when you get the wind on your team.

Land view toward fiordo Última Esperanza.


Land view Cerro Dorotea side, with pro frisbee tosser.

Happy New Year!

It's the beginning of summer down here, the days are long and the weather rainy. Lambs, which were born a few months ago, eat people's lawns or get eaten by people. The lambs have already grown quite a bit, so they're on super sale. And what better time for an asado than NY's eve, right?

In the markets store clerks incessantly restocked booze and briquettes while dodging the hordes of people trying to complete their shop before everything closed down. By 5 p.m., the carnicerias had freshly skinned and butchered lambs dangling in the windows. Strings of blood still dripped from their toothy grins. And their eyes, just a spot poppier for having no skin.

As I was walking around town revving up for our New Year's eve events--which did not include any little lambs--I passed several men shouldering black plastic bags stuffed with a clumsy something. Then one man with a bounce in his step and a garbage bag on his shoulder walked by, his long-necked lamb's head bobbing behind him. that solved the puzzle of the what's in the bag.

We're still thinking about buying a lamb to chow down in our backyard jungle. But what to do with the cutiepie when he turns mutton age and we aren't in town anymore. I have a rule about not eating pets.

Housekeeping

Shortly after 5 a.m., the clouds seem higher than they are, and more dispersed. All orange-bellied with neon-bright underscores. I steal peeks of it through the big bedroom picture window and jump back under the covers to try to sleep some more, but it’s useless. Instead I squeeze some sunniness into a cup and drink fresh grapefruit-orange juice for a pre-breakfast snack.

We have been busy getting the house in order. Making it livable. Serkan had found this furnished place for us to live before I arrived. Of course, when we returned to Natales from Ushuaia about three weeks ago, I was excited to see our new home. It is by far the best place I’ve lived in Puerto Natales. But that first night my nerves were on edge and I actually cried to see the condition of our new place—which if you compare it to other houses here, it really wasn’t bad at all. We arrived here around midnight after 15 or so hours on a bus with a long snowy delay at the Chilean-Argentine border because of Chilean government workers being on strike (again). We hadn’t eaten for the last 10 hours, so we were pretty much starved and exhausted.

So I lacked imagination that first night, while Serkan with his infinite patience, comforted me. I’m sure being back in the super comfort of the U.S. didn’t help me feel less overwhelmed about all the work this place would need. But we woke up the next morning, ready to tackle house work. Sanding, painting, scrubbing, spraying insect killer, unpacking boxes and bags. It’s been an ongoing project, but it finally feels like home. No more salmon pink walls in the bedroom or diarrhea yellow in the bathroom. No more horrifying lace curtains stuffed with earwig eggs and exoskeletons.

I’ve been pretty obsessed with insect prevention. When we first arrived, hundreds of Patagonian pill bugs would appear inside the tub just about every morning. And elsewhere of course, but not in such huge quantities. Luckily, these insects don’t creep me out that much. But getting rid of them and vacuuming up their dried-out shells was a daily affair for a while. Their colonies have dwindled though we have not obliterated them. I’ve vacuumed and cleaned places in this house that haven’t been cleaned in years, if ever. I’ve scrubbed with bleach and worn through several sponges and gloves and practically erased my own fingerprints.

All this in preparation for the tijeretas (earwigs) that are sure to arrive around February. These silly little bugs have me in a panic. I have nightmares about them, even though I’ve only seen one live one since we got here. When they come, they get into everything. They show in the food containers, in the teapots, in the mate bombilla, in the washing machine, sometimes even in the bed. When sipping mate during a major tijereta infestation, the critters get sucked up through the metal straw, and suddenly a skinny wiggly thing is crawling on your tongue. Thank goodness this hasn’t happened to me yet! But, yes, I am mildly obsessed. They’re not here yet, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure they don’t come. Now that the inside is clean, we have a pretty big yard to tend to. Some friends bought a little black lamb, an organic lawnmower, so we’re hoping to fatten him up for a few weeks. (And, no, this lamb is not going to be eaten for Christmas dinner.)

It may sound weird to have to do all this to a place that we are only renting for probably less than a year. But that’s how the houses are here. We are really lucky to have found a well-furnished house with heaters in every room. Some places you rent here might not even come with a kitchen sink. The fridge, stove, kitchen and bathroom sinks are still considered furniture, something that renters supply themselves. That said, I haven’t seen a rental that didn’t come with at least one heater. And it’s cold enough here to live without a fridge. I hope it doesn't sound like I’m complaining too much, because really I just want to give some context.

After all the poison, paint and love we’ve put into this place, it truly feels home. It’s our little nest and I love it. I have a sturdy writing desk where I’ve started to work in the mornings. I rough sanded it to get rid of the pink paint splats and to give it a rustic look, filled it with family and travel photos, and topped it all with a square of glass.

Earwig Bookmarks

Today, in a rare stint of warm weather, I hurried through some burnt piles of books, which Isabel, my landlady, was just going to throw away!!! In fact, they did dump about 3/4 of the books INTO THE GARBAGE before I said STOP!

Basically the books are from Isabel's late father, who was one of the first doctors on Tierra del Fuego. Sentimental for Isabel, right? Her house burned down a couple of years ago and these books are one of the few remnants of the house and of her dad. Books not in great condition, charred black on the spines and fore edges, and completely out of order. Which is bad for an encyclopedia whose whole existence is based on order--good ole alpha order.

They were awesome hard-bound encyclopedia type books with stellar pictures, examples, photos, glossy thick paper, quality stuff. And really, truly: they just don't make 'em like that anymore. I went through some of the pictures and craziness that is encyclopedianess when I first arrived here from my travels to Ecuador in August. They were stacked high on a desk buried in my bedroom before I shoveled all the clutter out of it. (You should have seen this place when I first got here, but that's a different story.) In August I asked Isabel what she planned to do with the books. She told me their story and said that she was going to take them to a specialist to have them reassembled.

After two months, they were shoved inside a doorless cabinet and tossed outside, in the Patagonian wind-rain-sun-wind-weather-120 km wind-vertical rain-street dogs and street cats-patagonia elements for christsake-weather. Then the earwigs moved in. Nests of them. Thousands of the creepy scissoring insects creeping and scissoring in and out of the loose blackened hinges. I put a plastic shopping bag over my hand and shook the tijeretas (earwigs in spanish) off of the remaining encyclopedic pieces, flipping through the pages again and missing something that I cannot remember. A series of pages with fruits and WWII and Gauguin and Ghana. One page in particular I nearly nabbed back in August. But I didn't because that one page would be integral in the remaking of the book. Part of me is still rapt in my first experience of those pages, but I can't remember exactly what lured me and I can't say with any certainty that if I saw it again, I would recognize it.

There is so much in this about non-attachment. Losing a parent (even at a 'natural' age), losing your home and all your belongings to fire, then throwing out what's left. I have gotten rid of everything and started over more times than I have fingers. But here I am packratting away the burned leftovers of another packrat. Incidentally, Isabel never would have taken the initiative to throw the papers out herself. It was the cleaning lady, who is also named Ysabel but with a Y, who couldn't handle all the earwigs inside the kitchen, so she started to clean up the mess that was in the backyard in hopes of slowing the swarms spiraling up through the drain in the kitchen sink.

I don't know what I will do with the books. A series of poems maybe, because the idea of ordering the world alphabetically fascinates me endlessly. Or just cutting up the pages and doing collages. So... maybe it isn't just a love of books, especially if I cut them up. But it pained me too much to see them bagged up and hefted to the side of the road to await the dump truck!

We're all just ships...

Each one of us is the captain of our own ship. And on the journey we let on various passengers and crew. They get on and off, come and go. The influx of passengers is a daily activity. The trick is to not get stuck, don’t toss out the anchor. Keep on keeping on… Maybe the ship gets capsized or moves slowly through icebergs, where you end up only inching along for a while. But someone will get on to help fix the leaks and you’ll steer your way through the icebergs and keep moving forward, if your anchor’s not down.

We had this great little talk with a handsome young 21 year old we met during our trek. He works and basically lives completely in the campo and is saving up money to study art in France. When he was 15 he died for about 20 minutes and watched everything from above his own drown body (I already mentioned the lack of swimming knowledge in Magallanes, right?) His energy was pure and deep and calm and beautiful. Marijke and I were doing the big circuit, which takes you behind the Torres del Paine. In a complete circle. We met him on our first day out, and perfectly, again on our last day in the park.

There were so many people we met, and it just felt so good to be in constant motion… I had a lot of time to talk with myself. My anchor’s been down, but I’ve been reeling it up, especially the last week hiking. I think Marijke and I both finished the big O different people. And me, I’m more at peace than I’ve been in ages, maybe ever? I feel like it’s overflowing. I wish I could put it in a bottle for use when I’m not feeling so llena de paz. But I’m sure I’ve got a few extra bottles of it laying around somewhere among my vital organs. So here we are, back in Natales. I’m not sure yet what’s about to happen, but I know it will be right and that everything will be OK.