Pardon Our Progress

I've always felt like an outsider in my own country, but increasingly, it is the natural world that feels strange to me.  We have lots of these little black birds here now that make an ugly sound.  I'm always tempted to kill their babies in the springtime, but I never have the heart to do it.  Then there's the home-invading stinkbugs, and the tiger mosquitoes.  None of these things were here when I was a child.  I'm not against exotic species - everything came from somewhere else at some point - but the rate of change in my environment is disturbing to me.

I refrained from posting about my disdain for Independence Day, but I suspect that a good part of my feelings about the holiday are because I hate summer.  I don't mind hot, dry weather that much (we had a drought last year and I kind of liked it), but the soul-crushing humidity of typical Virginia summers puts me in a really bad mood.  I'm running the air conditioner (set to 80 degrees) and I'm still irritable.

The bathroom is torn out and awaiting tile work - the shower has to be custom-built because the pre-made fiberglass ones don't fit.  My son's reaction to the pile of debris in the yard (to paraphrase), "Oh no, bathroom!  Broken!" reminded me of the feelings I'm too grown-up to express.  Remodeling is an act of violence.  I feel so ashamed of the gratuitous waste that seems to be an inevitable part of home improvement.  My brother intentionally placed the disposable dumpster far from the street, his stated reasons being to keep anyone from salvaging anything from it (Why?) and, more reasonably, to keep anyone from putting anything in it, since the company that collects them prohibits using them for food waste.  I remember 15 years ago when my first husband and I were living in a rental house and the kitchen stove, an older but good-quality electric stove, had two burners that didn't work.  The landlord sent over some goons who literally pushed our stove off the back steps, and replaced it with a new, cheap stove.  Remembering that stove tumbling into the yard, getting dented so that it wouldn't be useful to anyone, almost makes me cry even now. 

A lot of things almost, or actually, make me cry lately.  Loneliness.  Fear for my child's future.  Frustration at the ever-widening gap between my goals and my accomplishments.  Thinking about the suffering that is in store for humanity as this age of relative peace and ridiculous prosperity (at least for some) comes to an end.

No good mother would ever say she regretted having a child, but I will say there's a lot I didn't know when I made the decision to get pregnant, besides the big things I didn't fully comprehend (peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, cultural decline, globalization, and all that).  I didn't know how difficult it would be to accomplish any task at home, finish a conversation with a friend, run simple errands, or travel, for several years (so far), or how urgently I would need to do some of those things during these years.  I've never been all that attached to my life, but now I have a child and I've realized there's no one on either side of his family I would want to raise him, so I'm terrified of dying and leaving him unprotected.  My panic is rising.  I feel conflicting needs: the need to keep my son close to family (though I don't trust them to raise him, it's even worse to think of dying while he and I are alone in a foreign country), and the need to not waste whatever is left of my life trapped in an unhappy situation.  

I seem to be stuck; but a recent conversation with a friend may offer some badly needed peace of mind.  More on that to come.

In the interest of some actual content, I'll leave you with the favorite summer recipe of the Zelaya-Carter household:

Cook a pound of pasta for 4 servings, and drain, reserving a ladleful of the cooking water.  We use plain ol' white spaghetti.  Finely chop about 2 pounds of fresh, ripe, unpeeled tomatoes.  We use Romas; if you use slicing tomatoes, put them in a colander briefly to drain some of their juice. Snip or slice the leaves from several sprigs of basil.  Coarsely crumble about 8 ounces of goat's milk feta cheese.  Put tomatoes, basil, cheese, and a little olive oil in a large serving bowl; add cooked pasta, a couple tablespoons of the cooking water, and salt to taste.  Toss together and serve.