it's not you, it's me.

In the excitment of preparing to move to a beautiful mountain village at the close of the school year next week, I've forgotten how much I'm going to miss good old, run down Ciudad Colon. Despite the toilet paper-allergic toilet bowls, the cracked gravel roads that may give Harper shaken baby syndrome, the men who cat-call at anything that is not anatomically male, the chicken poop and feathers that decorate store-bought eggs, the meals that no matter how they're ordered always come out deep-fried, the relentless beans and rice that accompany every one of those fried meals (even breakfast), and the horrible giant flying beatles whose only apparent purpose in life is to become entangled in my hair in a misdirected search for light, I have kind of grown to love this place. As a matter of fact, as I reflect on my time here in Costa Rican suburbia, I've come to realize that it's not you, Ciudad Colon. It's me.

All of my time in this town I've either been uncomfortably pregnant or very much a mom in graduate school. These two factors have made it easy to pick out the negative aspects of living here while ignoring the beauty around me. So what if the only affordable cereal here is Corn Flakes? Who cares about the yappy mutts that all must have come from the lineage of one very potent weiner dog? It really doesn't matter if men feel the need to initiate their car alarms every time a woman walks by, because at the end of the day I get to sit on Big Mama's front porch with my baby while my husband accompaines the song of tropical birds with his guitar as we watch the sun set behind banana trees. And in those moments, I forget that the river in our front yard is actually a steady stream of sewage.