Healing Up

I landed in Guatemala with a broken, barely hanging on big toenail. Other parts of me bore similar characteristics, but this one was of the physical type that could be bandaged, buried in a shoe and forgotten about. Wasn't until Rio Dulce, the orphanage, the heat that dragged me to pull off the shoe, the plaster and welcome it to the freeing sandal. Immediately the kids spotted it, pointed, made disgusted faces calling it "feo", ugly. Several showed me their more ripe missing nails, others wanted to know what had happened, my story, but I didn't really know. Now, 6 months later, it's all anew, bright, shiny, bleached out by the sun - healed.

And now we are in Utila, Honduras, the cheap diving isla of the world surrounded by coral reefs and aquamarine sea. The ferry ride over was hairy, making many riders take full use of the plastic barf bags handed out, but not me, in the splashing, gut-wrenching seas I felt right in my glory of the usual nauseated state of my being over the past month and embraced the fact that I was much less green in the face than my husband and most others in the boat. We've rented an apartment on the point where we are surrounded by surf and constant ocean breezes.

Our sublime mountain house in Chajaneb combined with early pregnancy sent me a bit over the edge. Ten days of constant rain, the soaring keeness of my canine nose, the aversion to most food- even Matthew's hot new pizza rolls, the waif of mice droppings between the walls, the ill-plumbed Central American bathrooms that swell the house full of sewer gases, the ever present nausea that made me want to tear through my skin to the outside of my body and just run.

Even now I can barely think about the house in Chajaneb without gripping tight to a saltine. There were sweetened moments wandering in the hillsides up mud-covered paths that twirled between rows of corn and coffee plants. The way the clouds hung low letting your whole being disperse amongst them. Or those crazy rides to town, standing up, holding tight to a single metal bar, packed into the back of a flatbed industrial-size truck full of over 50 men, women, babies, children, chickens, turkeys, baskets of vegetables, tortillas, maize. As we tumbled up and over the rock roads, hillsides, bright green valleys all planted with crops woven in lines and patterns that mesmerize like the Mayan cloth weavings.

And now on Utila, life and my body feel a bit easier, a little less heavy minus the breasts which could now do a decent plump add for an implant surgeon. At the apartment I can keep all the windows wide open, am constantly wrapped in breezes and when a wave of nausea knocks at me, I can plunge into the tepid water for relief- really all quite nice. It helps, but traveling at this point in pregnancy is a drag and makes one want for the familiarity and comforts of home, but hey island paradise ain't bad. Often I want for Matthew's jumping around lightness and bodily strength, his good humor and ability to stay awake beyond 9 PM. He's been a great sport of it all and I'm ever so thankful for him. Every day he goes snorkeling for hours, finding spotted eagle rays, sandcastles of coral formations in brilliant colors, dog-size puffer fish, and schools of sergent majors surrounding and swimming with him, the big fish. He is in sheer delight and claims he could carry on with days like this for the rest of his life- but for now, it's one more week of island bliss and body recovery for me, then a way too long 17+ hour bus trek to Nicaragua.