a switch back

If my life's rolodex was flipped back to one year prior, you would have found me trudging up one- hundred steep concrete steps in Guanajuato, a backpack sticking to my sweaty hipster--who's-trying-too-hard-T-shirt, and nervously conjugating verbs regarding utilities, rent, and house keys with Papa Julian. I am irreversibly new and indebted to my travels in Mexico, which many of you read about on my infrequently updated blog. But TwentyTen has me teaching a room full of fourth graders, sixteen of whom speak Spanish once they board the bus and bump along home in the Piedmont's scorching heat. They are incredible-- a Spanglish "when you wish upon a star" dream that I've found in little ole' Siler City, North Carolina.

Our house is a disheveled, yet comfy artist's cottage on six acres, with inhabitants ranging from tinnitus-inducing mosquitoes, to rampant single-mother families of deer, to raccoons raiding our kitchen cabinets for Pecan Sandies, to a lady squirrel who taunts Atai, and finally to to that Mexican immigrant cat who suffers through my intolerable mothering (which just recently ended in my pinching off one of his nipples, mistook for another prevalent beast that lives here, the tick.)

We are currently looking for housemates, but after about 100 man hours of labor, the house is still not finished. So, the grim sides of the roomie equation look rather grim indeed-- finding renters in October who will bear being in the middle of Chatham County countryside, a roof covered in glorified Saran Wrap, and enough stuff to qualify us for an episode of "Hoarding: Buried Alive" on TLC. But the "pros" far out-weigh the cons with a screened in porch, a jungle-icious bathroom, two spacious bedrooms, cheap rent, endless art opportunities, and an eco-friendly utility bill. We are awaiting prospects which will hopefully be funneled to us through the glorious helper of all, Craigslist.

We are loving Chatham County, which all of its charm and its lack thereof. Thirty minutes from that light blue place where I spent so many years-- and it seems a world away. In a good way. No, in a great way.

Quick facts:
21- the number of students who currently claim me as their "Miss La"
16- the number of potted plants in my bathroom
55- the number of gallons in our aquarium, which we will fill with something devoid of a mammal's characteristics
9- the number of nipples Atai has after I detached one in my fervent search for ticks
5- the number of mosquito bites currently on my body from living in these woods
0- the amount of work I will be doing for school this weekend
200- the number of tennis balls that need to be cut up for my students' chairs
2- the number of aunts I will see this upcoming weekend
4- the number of slices of IP3 pizza I will eat after I sign off momentarily

(If you are reading this, Tori, I apologize for the zero listed above. I realize that it doesn't correlate with proper grammatical reasoning. Hah. Oh, and I found the book about eating the frog at the thrift store.)

I'll leave you with a poem I wrote at the quarry about a mile from our house.

bugs jump at thirty degrees
to my hairy legs
my short pegs
dragged like wooden spoons
through batter, the clatter
of dunes as I pray on cliffs
where tiny moons take flash
photography off the backs
of water striders
on the plane face of the lake
the wake crimps the glass
their legs, their rafts
dodge the hodgepodge cones
of sunlight, sunlight whose fingers
play rifts like a pianist
on crests, plaited like braids