Porcupine Babies: Does it Hurt?

Fleas

It’s amazing how much one little aspect of life can affect everything else. We’re so like the little wooden blocks of Jenga we used to play with as kids. Move one wrong brick and the whole tower first wibbles, then wobbles, then comes crashing to the floor in a cacophony of clattering wooden blocks.

I don’t know if it was the terrible noise of that game or the constant pressure of trying to finagle a block out of its rightful place to add to the towering height that bothered me so much, but the prospect of playing Jenga seriously stressed me out as a child. That being said, I was addicted and would play time and again, reveling in the alarm coursing through my body. Oh how things change.

But back to the point. Fleas, if you hadn’t guessed from a previous post, have been a keystone element in my time spent in Tennessee. My legs itch, my arms itch, my torso itches, my scalp itches. In fact, every time I washed my hair, I would wash scabs off the bites on my head and bleed. If you haven’t noticed, blood+water=LOTS OF BLOODY WATER. After a shower where I washed my hair, the bathtub looked a little like a reenactment of that scene from Psycho. Perhaps I exaggerate, but seriously. Fleas.

So I’m going to blame it on the fleas that I haven’t really been enjoying my time here yet. It’s hard to make friends at orientation when all you want to do is rip off your pants because the fabric is causing every inch of your leg to itch. Okay, maybe that move would have made me some friends, but I doubt they’d be the kind of people I actually want to be friends with.

And it’s hard to enjoy your bike ride to work when the tickle of the wind and the heat of the sun on your arms make the bites on your arms itch to the point where you want to forget to steer (or hold on to either handle) and just rip at your forearm with your nails.

Not to mention that everything is harder when you’re tired, which you constantly are because you constantly have to locate the Cortizone Cream (your new trusty bedfellow) to rub all over your body every minute of every hour of every night.

This flea problem has tainted my stay in Tennessee. But this Wednesday, my landlady brought in professional exterminators. We haven’t seen a flea since, and it’s Friday. Fingers crossed.

One thing I can’t blame on the fleas, however, is my work situation. After the abysmal drivers’ course on Monday, our actual jobs started. Imagine! It only took six days to get to the actual work part! (I shouldn’t complain. I was getting “paid” to play on ropes courses and untie human knots. This probably will not happen again until I become a kindergarten teacher. (Because that’s in the works…).)

But when work started for me, instead of learning the ropes of volunteer coordinating, I got to clean up and reorganize the (rather large) office we all share. There’s ten times too much furniture than we need in there, half the equipment from the farm has somehow managed to wander its permanent way into our closet space, and Every Single Dish that we used during our six days of orientation, unwashed, was stored in crates, baskets, and boxes, without rhyme or reason, hidden throughout the mess.

You could barely walk from one desk to another without knocking something over, crushing something beneath your feet or contorting your body to a funny angle to avoid either situation.

I was put on cleaning duty with one other AmeriCorps member, and we washed, organized, recycled, threw out, shuffled and cursed the objects in our office for three days. On Wednesday I spent probably three straight hours washing dishes.

So while I had work, I had no real work. It was frustrating to see how much there needed to be done, and how little good it could actually do the functionality of the office. We’ve finally gotten it to the point where you can walk around pretty freely, and although it still sets no cleanliness standards, most of the rotting honey comb, bug-bitten dried peppers and crusty stew pots whose origins no one remembers, are gone.

I say most.

You can never tell what’s going to be under the next pile.

I finally started my volunteer coordinating, however. A little yesterday, then more fully today. It’s interesting, and I’ve found I like making appointments and writing things down in a planner, but I reserve judgment until I can really get into it. But I have to point out, I found three more boxes of mason jars which need to be washed before my dish duties are officially done.

As you might imagine, things have been getting me a bit down lately. I’m grateful to have a job, and I’m especially grateful that I think this job will do other people good as long as I do it to the best of my abilities. That notwithstanding, I haven’t done too too much smiling lately.

Food Sharing

It has become a sort of joke in my family that I’m not a good food-sharer. The term, I think, probably comes from an episode of the Dog Whisperer; my family officially likens me to one of the psychotic dogs that, when it has food, will attack even its own foot should the little bugger sneak up on the food bowl and try to get a taste.



I seriously hope I’m not as scary as all that, but when it comes down to it, I don’t like to share my food. I bake banana bread with my sister and won’t invite anyone over to my house until the smell of baking is gone and the evidence of our efforts is hidden safely away in the fridge. I seriously contemplate whether refraining to reciprocate an offer of exchanged bites with the person I’m eating with is actually rude or not. I bury my leftovers in the back of the fridge so people won’t be tempted to pilfer them by their presence.

I’m not a good food sharer.

There are a few exceptions. I share freely with my sister, mother and father. I don’t blink an eyelash at giving whole loaves of bread to my high school friends. They can even drink my coffee if they want. A key bonding moment in my relationship with one of my best friends from college was when we split un-baked brownie mix for the first time—a delicacy with which my friend had never before been acquainted. But those are the exceptions to my rule of non-sharing.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but it takes an incredible amount of time invested in friendship, as well as an unbreakable bond of familial proportions, to allow me to share food without hesitation with you. You’re not alone if I hesitate in giving you a bite of my food. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you—I can pretty much guarantee that I do—it just means that we haven’t gotten to that point in our relationship yet.

So how is it that this guy I met just under a year ago is free to take the yellow-dyed chicken right off my plate of Singapore noodles? To share dumplings with me, and split a chocolate tower of chocolate doom chocolate cake with no danger of puncture by my three-tined fork?

Because he’s the type of person to drive from Texas to New York and make an overnight stop in Tennessee to see me.



I had the great pleasure of having one of my best friends in the wide world come to visit me yesterday. He’d planned this in advance, I’d known he was coming for a week and a half, but when he showed up in front of my house, I was floored. Utterly taken aback by the fact that he’d come to visit me. Here. In Tennessee.

Nothing against Tennessee or anything, but there’s really not much to see here. Unless of course you’re stopping in Graceland (where I fully expect to encounter Paul Simon paraphernalia rather than Elvis….) But he stopped here anyway.

Having him here for the evening was like Christmas. You know it’s coming, but you’re completely blown away at how special the day is when it actually arrives, and then it’s over with all too soon.

I met his mother, we went to dinner, we took a walk by the Tennessee River, came home; he played banjo, sang, broke out the guitar, sang. We laughed and hugged and talked for hours. We looked up whether baby porcupines are as painful to give birth to as one might imagine (their spines, by the way, start out soft, though they harden within the first thirty minutes of life). We watched a few shows and laughed and hugged and talked some more. I may have slept a total of three hours before I had to go to work, but I would have paid a price ten times that for the amount of happiness his visit brought me. Spending those hours with my dear friend put my petty complaints about fleas and strange work-lack-of-work into perspective, because when there’s something that good in your life, nothing can really be all that bad.

Thank you for coming to visit, friend. You have no idea what it meant to me. And although it wasn’t intended as tangible proof of my love at the time, just remember. I let you eat one of my yellow dyed shrimp.