20-minute observations - #3

Date: February 21, 2012
Location: sitting in a plastic lawn chair on the roof of our house

I've definitely gotten over some (not all, but some) of my awkwardness about sticking out. If anyone looks up and sees me sitting in the sun on our roof with my feet propped up on the short brick wall surrounding the edge of of the roof, they will surely give me that who-is-this-strange-gringo-and-what-the-heck-is-she-doing look that I see so often directed my way. But, for better or worse, after a few months here I decided I'm going to get those looks no matter what, simply by virtue of my height and skin & hair color, so why bother trying to blend in? Today is the first brilliantly sunny day we've had in over a month. There are puffy white clouds on the horizon clustered around the volcanoes, but otherwise, the sky is blue, blue, blue! Too bad for our friends Dan and Tonya, who just left three days ago after a 10-day visit full of fog, clouds and rain. A guy just walked by on the sidewalk below, preceded by the tinny music coming from his cell phone. Most cell phones come equipped with radios that get used a lot more frequently than I would've imagined. Now the gardener is passing through the front gate to load a sack full of grass clippings into his pickup truck. Well, we call them "gardeners" but to be honest I have my doubts. The clinic pays them to come once a month and they do a lovely job of clipping, trimming and sprucing up the backyard garden and tiny front lawn. But the rose bush has never shown even a hint of a bud. The calla lilies lost their original blooms a few weeks after being planted and haven't recovered. Two flowering bushes don't really flower anymore. And the poinsettia bush I was so excited about seems to have just realized he missed Christmas and is struggling valiantly to produce a few red leaves. So ... the question is: Are they gardeners? Or are they three guys with a pickup truck, a weedwacker and an ability to convince businesses to hire them? Another man just wandered down the street wearing a black suit and tie and talking on a cell phone. I suppose it's like this in most cities, but one thing I really like about life here is the variety of people you see walking the streets at all times -- businessmen in suits and people digging through garbage cans collecting plastic bottles, old people and kids, university students and groups of middle-aged woman off to the gym or a cafe. So much life and activity! In the distance, maybe 3-4 blocks away, I can hear the rhythmic voice projected through a microphone that tells me the junk collector is coming. He rides around on a motorized bike with a cart attached collecting ... well, just about anything. Scrap metal, old school notebooks, glass bottles, shoes. Oh, here is he comes puttering down our road now. He must've been closer than 3 blocks. Looks like he is just getting started for the day. All I see in his cart are a couple jackets, a red plastic toy, a pile of messy white wire and a small black appliance that could be a grilled cheese maker, or maybe a typewriter. It's hard to tell from up here. Now here comes the watchiman -- the one who has twice captured injured birds stuck in our yard. We've gotten used to his random blasts on the whistle throughout the day and night, for the most part. It doesn't annoy me anymore and only sometimes makes me laugh. Usually I barely notice it. Over my right shoulder I can hear pigeons cooing and fluttering around on the wall of the house directly behind ours. Those are the pigeons David has been talking about killing every since we got here. I'm sure by now they're thinking his threats are empty. Although they'd better not get too comfortable pooping and shedding feathers down onto our freshly manicured garden (shout-out to our "gardeners" who just pulled away in their pickup), because David just purchased some birdseed the other day from a woman in the main plaza -- and that's his first step to baking poisoned birdseed cookies to launch up on our neighbor's roof with his slingshot.