​Laying in the Peruvian emergency room, a few hours after breaking my leg and with the shock of the pain wearing off, I looked over at Margaret, my currently designated “responsible family member” and said, “I’m wondering what the message is from the Universe in this one.” She smiled at me, but having known me only about ten days, didn’t quite know what to say. “Be careful on stairs? That seems like the logical lesson.” Logical, yes, but not a sign from the Universe.

Jim just wanted to watch the birds.

It frustrated me so, the incessant focusing of the binoculars, the prattling on about beak shape and wing colors. I’d be craning my neck to try to see the lions camouflaged in the early morning grass, and Jim would be looking the wrong way. When it was time for sundowners, the kids and I rushed to gulp ours, eager to get back on the hunt for a Big Five spotting. Jim, though, he lingered. Smiling to himself as he watched something flit by and land in an acacia tree. Some warbler, maybe, or a tropical tree-sap-sucker. He told me, proudly, and probably patiently, how he identified each bird, but me, I was distracted by the baboons calling from up on the ridge. I remember thinking—and I hope not saying—that we have birds at home. They’re nothing special and not worth wasting our time on But leopards! Rhinos! Elephants! Lions! Hippos! Not to mention the swirly horned kudu and the massive wildebeest and those noisy baboons…now those were special. Now those were worth lingering for.

​But Jim, Jim knew otherwise.

​The honeybee is nature’s linchpin, a keystone species, without which there is a ripple effect of ecological destabilization. More plainly, without the honeybee, our ecosystem could collapse.
 
Honeybees are, after all, workers. Flitting incessantly from pollen source to pollen source in pursuit of honeycomb perfection. Feeding the queen while also feeding the rest of us, not only with the sweet delight of their honey but in all that cross-pollination that keeps the rest of our food system alive. They are simultaneously dogged and sensitive, single-mindedly pursuing clovers and wildflowers and blossoms while ever-so-vulnerable to changes in the world around them. When the snow melts and they no longer need to warm the queen, they should return to our gardens en masse. But whatever we humans are putting out into the world makes it less and less likely that we’ll hear that C-sharp wingsong in our own gardens.
 
Fierce. Productive. Vulnerable. Celebrated for their hard work and its sweet payoff, the honeybee holds us together. Wings flapping, fuzzy legs coated in yellow life, the stinger of last resort. One of the most productive species on earth, and also one of the most imperiled.

Dear Babies,
​
Three weeks is a long time to be without your mama. And it’s not just three weeks, I know. Yes, it’s these three weeks in Peru, but it’s also another two weeks in India, and those long weekends of conferences and girls’ weekends. It’s those hours after school when I’m finishing up work and you’re in after care. It’s that once-a-week late-night of teaching and the occasional night out with Papa. And when we finally are home together, it’s all those hours you want me to play but I’m feeding us and picking up after us and signing permission slips and checking the calendar and giving you baths and trying to make clean clothes magically appear. It’s when I’m sleeping in my own bed, but you wish I were just sandwiched between the two of you, Anna’s arm wrapped around my neck and Rory snuggled into my arms.

​I remember the first time I was groped. On the school bus in elementary school, some boy who lived in our apartment complex and touched me in a way that I knew was wrong. He grabbed me, and I punched him in the stomach. 

​Milwaukee burned while we relaxed in the North Woods.
 
This is the inequality we live with, in our Milwaukee home and also everywhere. The fires, the rage, the sadness, the explosion – it is not mine. Mine is from a distance: while we explain to Anna that no, not everyone has a vacation home, we are also reading the news of a community in crisis just down the road from our 'regular life' home. We are heartbroken for our neighbors but also unaffected and wrapped in security systems.

I know schools. I spend my life in schools. I study schools, I work in schools, I pretty much live in schools. And school here in Mexico…Well, it’s different.

My head swims with a constant stream of, “Wow. In the States, it’s like X, but in Mexico, it’s like X.” Some are improvements, some are infuriating, and some are just baffling cultural differences. But different nonetheless. Never mind that I am teaching at an “American” school. This place is definitely not American. Plus, I get the added benefit of Anna being in a local Montessori program, a non-Americanized (but still private, so relatively affluent) school. And man! These schools are just…different.

Here are just a few of the things that just don’t match up between American and this little sample of Mexican schools (with the full acknowledgement that my n=2 sample is skewed heavily toward upper-class Mexico).

As soon as we left the house for Friday night paletas, I knew. I could smell it in the air. That tell-tale mix of earth, minerals and water.

The rains were coming.

​I was teased into thinking they’d arrived a week earlier when, on my walk home from school, a quick drizzle sputtered down. When the first droplets hit my arms–my arms, hot and sticky after a day spent herding teenagers in classrooms that grew hotter and thicker as the day wore on–it was as if I were electrified. Every cell in my body began zinging and bouncing and reaching for those rain drops. Those precious few drizzle drops that sent me home in a skip, only to be dashed by Nico’s solemn head shake, “No, no es la lluvia. Es muy temprano. Y lluvia ahorra es muy mala, muy mala. La próxima día será más húmedo y con mucho más calor.”

I am not really the biggest fan of Mother’s Day.

It’s one of those holidays that seems to be set up for disappointment, with Hallmark-inspired fantasies of perfectly behaved children that the real world can never live up to. The very act of mothering seems to conflict with Mother’s Day dreams of a pampered day ‘off,’ despite the fact that mothering is what we’re supposed to be celebrating. Never mind when real life (read: AP exams) requires Dad to work all weekend and Mom to do double child-care duty. Or when your rambunctious toddler makes a lovely meal out (or in!) seem more stressful than that easy box of mac-and-cheese. Or when your four-month-old cries his little heart out as the soundtrack to your day (or worse: night). This year, I really could have done without Mother’s Day. I would have been happy with a Let Mom Sleep Just a Little Day.

It’s been a rough 10 weeks in the Gibwater casa.

​In the 10 weeks since the Littlest One was born, it’s been what feels like a cascade of mala suerte here on Calle Colomos. We’ve become the Bad News Osos.

Time can start to drag on when you’re waiting for a baby.
​
Here in Mexico, that waiting begins six weeks prior to your expected due date, when the government begins your twelve-week incapacidad. The first four weeks of my maternity leave, however, were anything but a drag. Free from lesson planning and grading for the first time since August, I dove full-force into all the other things that had been put on hold in my life: I spent days working on my dissertation. I organized and arranged the Tadpole’s room. I stocked the freezer with casseroles and the pantry with homemade granola. I caught up on the household budget. I finally finished unpacking and moving into our house. I dove into some pleasure reading. I celebrated the holidays and even escaped the city for a few days. I reveled in some free time with my family.

When I was in Japan, I could while away hours in 100 yen stores. Stationary, t-shirts, socks, bowls, candy bags, food wrappers, you name it–all were covered in ridiculously bad translations of English expressions, and in the 100 yen store, there were seemingly infinite bins of tear-inducing, gut-shakingly-funny mis-translations. In Japan, that made sense, but I guess I never really expected as much from India’s linguistic treasures.

Boy, was I wrong!
​
Forget all my PhD reading that I schlepped halfway around the world only to leave buried in the bottom of my backpack. In India, signage was the literary masterpiece of the trip.

Life moves a little more slowly in India. As an Indian American living in Dehra Dun reminded us, there is Central Standard Time…and then there is Indian Standard Time. And when you’re hanging out in the quiet towns ofUttarakhand, in winter nonetheless, life seems to whisper along.

Case in point: While in Rishikesh, we’d while away the first hour or so of our day sipping Nescafe in our hotel lobby, watching sensationalist Delhi news accounts and giggling over the matrimonial ads. Time inched along, not bothered by car horns or diesel fumes or much of anything, save a sadhu or two. Glancing up from our almost-coffees and newspapers, we’d spy a cow eating breakfast on our hotel stoop, ladies gathering for an early morning chat, delivery men desperately wishing cars were allowed in this part of town, monkeys making mischief. Life moved slowly (and dare I say: peacefully) on that Rishikesh street, aflutter with life at daybreak.

Ten minutes in the life of a Rishikesh street (including a cow who seemed to be inspired by our dawdling).

“It’s pretty amazing to see what people have bottled up inside of them."

So Foley astutely observed at our Tuesday night outing to Rock Star Gomeroke. A Madison institution, Rock Star Gomeroke is that most authentic of karaoke experiences: you sing, rock band plays back-up.

Amid thunderclouds and ripening corn, I drove to work this morning, sleeplessly and deliriously marveling at this strange new parallel universe I have entered: Wisconsin. Ross and I have been residents of Madison, WI for nearly two weeks now, and every day seems to pack a whopper of a ‘sconi punch

Imagine this: Thousands of butterflies—orange, white, blue, brown, red, and yellow—flitting around you as you cruise down a swift river in a kayak-like wooden boat. Beyond the palm roof of your lancha, you can see jungle, thick, sweaty, and alive. There are vines, palms, banana trees, and giant tree trunks oozing ancient Mayan bubble gum. Monkeys lounging in trees, monkeys howling and grunting in the distance. Bromeliads hang in fuschia splendor from a towering ceiba tree; yellow and purple orchids float on a draft of wind down to the river. And as a soundtrack to it all, birds twitter and sing while cicadas and tree frogs add an incessant bass rhythm.