Life (ours and the critters') this week

What a Christmas vacation! Our slow, easy days have been filled with playing Go Fish!, tennis, and Frisbee; swimming; jaunting to the mercadito for water, tortillas, and produce; washing dishes; making up games to play in the house (like tag with your arms folded or various relay races that involve running from one end of the house to the other while making motorcycle noises); visiting with the neighbors, Fernando, Sarita, and Evelyn; and avoiding the intermittent waves of smoke from the other neighbor’s daily plastic fires. The weather is pleasant all the time, and we sleep with the windows open. Last night as we looked at the moon and Jupiter’s moons through Fernando’s telescope, I was glad I had put on long sleeves.

Yesterday I was happy to do laundry all day long in our new washer. I hung it on the line and we ran past it in our game of Kitty Wants a Corner.

There are little glitches like there always are when you move to a new home. Some are fixable, like the plumbing problem in the master bathroom; some we’ll live with, like the fact that our new fridge is too tall for the kitchen cabinets. We’ll keep the fridge in our dining/computer/craft table/library/living room (where, incidentally, we discovered and hopefully exterminated a colony of gigantic ants setting up house in our wall). That room gets a lot of use.

Each day we seem to meet new representatives of Honduran fauna, some outdoors and some indoors. Apparently the pesticide bomb that the landlord used before we came has about a one-week efficacy, and we’ve been in the house for just over a week now. In the last couple days, creatures have appeared, including those giant ants, teeny tiny crumb-sized ants, a huntsman spider (about the size of Aspen’s palm, a flat, skittery spider that stays on walls and ceilings), a cockroach or two (the big ones have only been outside so far), and an unidentified but now captured 10-legged friend with noticeably large mandibles. If we had come to Honduras before Stuart’s PhD studies in entomology, I don’t know if I could have handled life with so many critters. But they all make good food for the geckos. The boys found one in the room the other night, and it chirped them to sleep. We found a teeny baby gecko in our doorway this morning. It was about an inch and a half long.


Outside, we have seen spiders the size of my palm. They are common garden spiders and make their yellow webs in our mango trees. Our neighbors had a tarantula on their bodega wall. A flock of parrots swooped and chattered over the houses last evening. During a drive on campus, we saw a half dozen large lizards (iguanas or monitors?), turtles, herons, and a turquoise-browed motmot. (That’s one you should look up.) Large cockroaches, large leaf-footed bugs, millipedes, centipedes—what you would expect. Flocks of vultures soar overhead constantly, and we now know from firsthand experience how true the statement is that where the vultures are gathered, there will the carcass be. All these observations we have made with no real effort or searching; so many more wonders await!