December: Dust on our necks and in our armpits and up our noses

 

We turned the calendar page and entered December. We’d lived in Lomalinda for three and a half months.

 

Back home, Seattle would be a place of swollen clouds and rain, and frost once in a while. People would be wearing rain boots and raincoats and stocking caps and gloves.

 

Family and friends would have recently gathered for Thanksgiving, a squally season when tempests stirred up wild seas and sent ferry boats bobbing and careening, when windstorms downed trees throughout the Puget Sound region, caused widespread power outages, left half-baked turkeys and pumpkin pies in cold ovens, and drew people together around fireplaces in homes perfumed by wood smoke.

 

But Lomalinda had just transitioned out of her hot rainy season and was into her hotter dry season. We were enjoying clean cerulean skies and hardly a wisp of a cloud.

 

Daytime temperatures rose to over a hundred degrees in the shade—cruel, withering. The green scent of rainy season had given way to the spicy fragrance of sun-dried grasses. Immense stretches of emerald disappeared, leaving grasslands stiff and simmering under unrelenting sun.

 

Muddy paths and single-lane tracks turned rock-hard and, with use, changed to dust. Yards and airstrips and open fields turned to dust, too.

 

From sunrise to sundown, a strong wind blew across the llanos, a gift from God because it offered a little relief from the heat. On the other hand, we had to use rocks and paperweights and other heavy objects to keep papers from blowing away.

 

Dust blew through slatted windows and into homes and offices and settled on our counters and furniture and in cracks and crannies and on our necks and in our armpits and up our noses.

 

The Ariari River ran low and people in the nearby town, Puerto Lleras, caught caiman, butchered it, and sold it to our commissary.

 

Some people hauled in catfish, ten feet long and longer, which they hacked into chunks and sold in our commissary or served in the dining hall.

 

During rainy season, sometimes laundry took days to dry in our screened-in porch, but in dry season I hung laundry outside and, after pegging up the last garment in the laundry basket, I took down the first pieces I’d hung—the hot wind had already dried them. (From Chapter 16, Please, God, Don’t Make Me  Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

Esther Gross photo