Pomeranian On a Hot Tin Roof
This journey was only weeks ago and it already seems like a vapor in my mind. I remember that it was when contentment and happiness began filling my every step. I recall that giant rock. The one that I stared at for hours. It was more than meditating to me. It was focusing, realizing that the gaps didn’t always need to be filled in.
It was peanut butter and papaya sandwiches and basil tea. It was the monkeys leaping from the trees for the fences, for the bananas that the children eagerly put there. It was they wanted to show me that the monkeys come when you put out bananas. No big deal. It was the way they looked at my overwhelming joy with curiosity. For me, they were the first ones I had ever seen that weren’t in captivity. For them, they were as common as squirrels. They asked me if I wanted to see those too.
It was the black boys with machetes. The puppies with mange. The garbage. The black sand mixed with the white sand. The long walks onto the shelf of the dead reef. Watching the sea birds pick from the holes underneath the water. Being amazed that they didn’t move when I was close. Feeling like a Caribbean Snow White as I inched closer. The vultures who were more daring. Who would take a step in my direction without faltering when I stepped forward too.
The way the days smelled like warm wet pine and palm and marijuana. The jungle where the road ends. It was Linda and her 19 year old cat. It was her flustered merriment, her flustered anger, her rightfulness, her vulnerability.
It was seeing it and thinking it over and again. Pomeranians on a hot tin roof. Pomeranians on a hot tin roof. Pomeranians on a hot tin roof. So I wouldn’t forget.