I’m experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance right now. We’re nearing the middle of December, there are Christmas lights and decorations everywhere and we’re all counting down the days until the long holiday break. But it’s also 70 degrees, mostly sunny, entirely green and I’m wearing the same summer dresses I packed in August. I’m starting to realize how much I have depended on the weather and corresponding changes in wardrobe mark the passing of time.
Which is not to say that the weather here hasn’t changed. We have definitely- and in spite of dire predictions- moved out of the rainy season and into the transitional windy season that precedes summer. The nights are usually clear now so I get to see the stars lying strangely a-kilter. The wind rattles windows and corrugated metal fences and threatens to blow my laptop closed when I work outside. This is how December and January will be, I’m told. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas or that 4 months have passed. And the more I see Christmas trees and read snowy statuses on facebook, the more it seems like I’m living in another space-time dimension.
In other time related news, I have finally acquired a past. A past tense, that is. In the last two weeks my Spanish class has reached the preterit tense, ending my ‘only the present exists’ Zen sentence constructions. “Yesterday, I buy food.” “Two years ago, I live in Burundi for a month.” “I write a paper last weekend.” The verbs accompanied by a hand motion of throwing something over my shoulder as gestural indication of tense. A tense mudra. (Laxmi and Ellen just laughed, probably Mara too.) I’m still not practicing often enough and my hoped for fluency seems far away- especially with time quietly evaporating behind my back.
It’s the University’s 30th anniversary and alumni are in town this weekend for the first ever reunion. We’ll all be hobnobbing with our counterparts from years past, looking for connections that may lead to jobs when we graduate before we know it in July. That’s the true reality, the past and the present and the future all wound up together in a tangle of snakes swallowing each other’s tails- or their own, but who can tell? Hmmm. Does that sound grim? It doesn't feel grim, just true.
2 comments:
Do I have to have a goggle account to leave a comment? @1930 local it is +1F (-17C) so eat your heart out. It is going down to -13 tonight and I promissed I would be at work at least an hour early. This is the first time I have looked at a blog. It looks like a great way to communicate but it must take time. How many blogs do you look at. As I write this Mom is taking a call and we think it is from you but we can't hear anything. Most snow since the 1991 Halloween storm, 4 hours behind the snowblower to clear a path to the back of the barn, the chicken coop, the mail box and the driveway. Do they have snowblowers in Costa Rica
just wanted to say I laughed too. :)
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