We return from Guadalajara on La Linea más Cómoda. The little girl in front of us keeps coughing extravagantly without covering her mouth (I never really cared about this before!) while her little brother screams. The man behind us coughs in a lower register. We don't know it yet but we're getting what they have. Somehow I feed the baby while we’re swinging down the curving highway above Manzanillo. Back in Barra, mosquitos fall on us joyfully. A hurricane passed through while we were away. We open the door and find mold growing on the bed. It’s on kitchen utensils and the big pot we cook pasta in. There are probably four different kinds of ants living in our room. I think they were all here before, but now they seem to have asserted the inevitable rights of the natural world over the veneer of human habitation. A giant black and yellow beetle and a huge spider crawl along the tiles.

Somehow a bug has drilled through this can of pineapple, acquired in Bahía Tortugas, halfway down the Baja peninsula. At the time I wondered why Adam would buy canned pineapple in Mexico. Some vestigial memory of life in western New York, where his mom bought canned pineapple at the Shurfine, and he would eat the acid sweet rings right out of the can?


And this stuff is still here. All the way from Berkeley. It sounds innocuous—Sunflower seed butter, kind of weird, but no red flags. It tastes like sweet dirt--forget that, it puts the butt back in butter, this stuff is NASTY.


We have new neighbors for a week. They're Canadian. They hang out in the palapa drinking beer and chainsmoking. I hear the woman shout at her husband, "That guy saw you and he fell on his ass laughing!" maybe ten times at the end of a long day of tequila and cerveza. Tourist Mexico at its best.


The baby keeps them up at night.

Burping is hard.

When they leave, everyone goes outside.



Except me. I've spent over a week being cooped up in this apartment because I can't figure out how to use the damn baby carriers and plus it's like a million degrees out there. I remember shortly after she had her baby my friend Kathleen said, "I just want to go to Starbucks." I really want to go to Starbucks--though downtown Barra will do.