Day Nine: Not for the weak stomach

I think I’ll call it: Rae’s Red Floor. Because what happens when you paint a floor red and then regret it? You cannot unpaint it, that’s what happens.  So everyone agrees to live with it.

The floor in the meditation center on my rooftop was a mixture of paint powder and cement, and it was lovely, but almost impossible to clean.  Cleaning it was like trying to clean a piece of sandpaper, so we ran around holding our hands under people’s plates as a preventative measure to anyone dropping anything on it. And then the painter was telling me that it was impossible to seal, which now I’m thinking – hmm? Because isn’t concrete lacquer a thing?  We had a concrete floor in the North, and it was sealed with something. Or something else. I don’t really know my terminology.  It might be some whatsit compound.

(I don’t have concrete floors now.  I have fancy marble floors, with the emphasis on the fancy- they have large orange stripes and veins running through them on the diagonal.  It was too late, when we realized that we could have had more input on the floors in the house.  We could have said, “something whatsit grey and plain!” but instead we showed up with slack jaws, turning our slack-jawed selves into smiling nodding slightly stunned foreigners when our landlords proudly wanted to know if we loved our floors.  Marble floors are quite the thing, here. And marble is cheaper than wood.)

Anyways, so I wanted to do something nice while Cate and Chinua were gone, and the floors needed to be dealt with.  Somehow the paint happened.  I don’t know. It wasn’t me.

No, no. That’s not true.  It was me, there’s no use trying to fool anyone.  It’s nice.  Just a little… shiny. And red. We like it.  Really.  Cate has been very gracious, considering the fact that I tattooed her baby that she oversaw being built from the very first step, last year. Rae’s Red Floors.  I’m a little down about it.

In other news, there was a pig slaughtering party in our front yard this morning! Which means that a Goan Catholic Feast Day is going on, and I believe this one is the feast of the Holy Cross.  I asked my neighbor what the feast was, and she looked blank for a minute, and then said, “Jesus.”  I don’t know how I feel about the pig butchering.  On one hand, I have no problem with people raising and harvesting their meat.  No problem at all.  These spoiled pigs have the run of the village and the surrounding jungle, they lead happy lives, and then someone eats them. As far as meat goes, though I find pork disgusting, it’s very conscious, this free range animal that helps to keep snakes away.  And then there’s the beauty of all the guys in the neighborhood getting together and hacking away with choppers. It’s camaraderie!

And it’s disgusting.  And very close to my house. And my kids love to watch.  I draw a line at the actual butchering. (Remember Laura plugging her ears so she couldn’t hear the squealing?)

It will go on, with or without my approval. As it should.

Here’s another tangent.  Yesterday, just before I called Chinua for my sanity, we were eating at a restaurant here, and one of the dishes came with (surprise!) black mushrooms in it.  There is nothing more disgusting than black mushrooms to me, and I couldn’t eat it. YaYa tried it, and her input was that it tasted like millipede, at which point I nearly sprayed the table with my food, I found that so funny.   Millipedes are filled with juices that come out if your baby pulls one apart or someone accidentally runs over one with a scooter (we don’t do these things on purpose, we are insect lovers around here) and YaYa has never eaten one, but they smell terrible.  She was astutely inferring that the black mushrooms taste as bad as millipedes smell.  That’s my girl.

Just as an aside:  I stopped having Kid A read aloud to me, since you made me feel better about his little reading bumps becoming smooth over time.  Now he is speeding merrily along.  I hand him a book which is supposed to be the week’s worth of reading, and an hour later he says he’s finished.  It was just the tediousness of reading aloud that was making him sigh and pretend to fall asleep, even when I told him that it wasn’t funny, repeatedly, ending with an elbow in the ribs. I’ve been concerned about his reading and writing abilities being so far apart, but I guess I’ll just let him run off with it, and treat them as totally separate things.

The end.  One new member of our little community just arrived, so I’ll go to say hello now.  I love you all.

(Every night I feel that I don’t have anything to write, but then I seem to ramble on so.)