January Rains

It's been raining in Belize day after day. Like a monsoon but not a monsoon (because we don't have monsoons). But steady torrential rain. And then it stops and then it starts and then it stops. There's no hanging out laundry or keeping anything dry. The papaya leaves hanging in my house to dry for papaya tea, which is supposed to be effective against lymes disease, molded. I will have to start again. Fabio will drive through the neighborhood on his motorcycle and spot a papaya tree and ask for a few leaves from a neighbor for me.

All of the dirt and rock that a helpful neighbor (finally) dumped across the road a month ago to fill in not just potholes but impassable pits in the road, has been beaten into soup by the rain. The Subaru fishtails all the way down my road through the mud and slimy rock when I slip into town in the evening to take Fabio a little dinner. (Caponata, made with the long slender light purple eggplants, since the fat round ones seem to overpower it, with celery and garden tomatoes and olives and capers. And red bell peppers from my garden that taste spicy even though they are not hot peppers.)

Elias, who was afraid of rain in the US, stays outside in the white powdery crushed rock under the overhang of the stairs while I visit in town. He loves to be out in the night, even if it's raining, though he still runs for the closet if there's very much thunder or if the barometric pressure skyrockets suddenly (which he believes could forecast not just rain but the end of the world as we know it). Then, when I come back through the gate up the slippery grass and rock covered hill, he yelps wildly as though a lot has happened while I was gone and I should have been there.

I fall into bed. The windows have never been closed in the time I have lived here. You want air circulation all of the time or everything will mold. Makeshift curtains of sarongs and lengths of fabric billow over the windows as the wind picks up. I fall asleep listening to a podcast of Jimmy Stewart in a radio drama from the 1940s on my iPad. It must have been hard for girls of the day not to swoon over the boy-next-door-ness of Jimmy Stewart, I decided.

In the night I wake up at the sound of another downpour, the whole earth being watered, the dog bowls in the yard getting washed out, and the rain barrel overflowing. Somehow even in the rain I can still hear Elias snoring outside my window. The Gute sleeps (day and night) on the day bed in the front room. The Guest Puppy Trixie alternates between sleeping in the basket at the foot of the Gute and sleeping outside in her crate, around the corner from Elias. (Eli will not tolerate her to be  near.) Then, at 5 am I hear the loud chugging of a truck, as though it is in my yard, full of men's voices whooping and hollering. It is not in my yard, it is traveling along the road on the other side of the jungle and down the hill, but the sound carries on the humid air. I wonder in my sleep if someone has been robbed.

Now Today is deceptively sunny and what section of grass the caretaker "chopped", as they say (because it often is accomplished with a machete instead of a lawn mower - except at my house where the landlord somehow found a full-on John Deer Riding Mower ), has grown back taller than it started. All the better to hide the tarantulas in the dusk, and the slithery skinny snakes in the day.

Guthrie (the Gute) is stamping his feet now, standing on (his) day bed and growling for a little outdoor time before the rain comes. Or so I thought. I open the bars and he does not go out but keeps stomping. Oh, I am burning another pancake on the stove for my breakfast. Gute is my little fire warden. I toss it in the compost bucket and turn off the flame. I only have 2 tablespoons of maple syrup from Wisconsin left anyway. Better to save it for one last breakfast hurrah another day.

The flimsy plastic table on the patio, my dining room, is all set up for chopping fruit in the rain, under the overhang of the porch. A 26 pound water melon awaits. They had nothing smaller in the striped variety, which always seems to be sweeter here. And a pineapple and two papaya are lined up as well. I hear roosters crowing in the distance and the rustling of leaves in the trees so that I have to look to see if it is wind or rain. The drops start to fall. It's a January morning in Belize.