One of the hardest things for me to acclimate to here is the cold. I do not like being cold. My fingers turn blue and my toes go numb and my nose won’t stop running. My shoulders hunch up and my back hurts and I get The Spine Shivers. I get snippy.

I should clarify: I don’t mind the cold as long as I can get away from it. As long as there is a warm place to go to, I rather enjoy the cold and the things that go with it, like wool socks, candles, and hot drinks. But put me in a drafty, cement block house with a tin roof and no hot water (except for in the shower—thank goodness we have hot showers!) and no heat source, and then make it rain for days on end and make the temperature plummet so low that it frosts, and you have one very chilled and unhappy mama.

I heat up water on the stove and then soak my fingers in it until I can feel them again. I layer up. I steal my husband’s coat. I wrap myself up in a comforter like a human burrito and then slouch down in front of the computer and do not move. I do jumping jacks. I try to pretend I’m not actually cold and wash my hair in the kitchen sink and nearly pass out from an iced skull. I turn on the oven and stick my feet in it. I dream of an oven big enough that I could climb in completely. Or I fantasize that I’m a sick baby bunny with kind owners who take pity and put it, in its hay-lined nesting box, into the turned-low oven to warm up.

Of course I’m being a wimp. All these thousands of people have been living without heat for centuries and they’re doing just fine. It’s doable. I should just relax into the perpetual cold and go with it.

But how is it physically possible to relax when you’re cold? I can’t figure it out.

A friend commented that she doesn’t believe we have bad weather here because the sun is always shining in the photos I post. That’s because I don’t take my camera out when it’s raining! I don’t want to get it wet and the lighting is bad in the gray dark. But this latest rainy spell, I made it my goal to take some pictures. I couldn’t really catch the bleak, cold wetness, probably because we’re living in a tropical wonderland, but I tried.

There’s a pattern to the weather, I’m learning. We’ll have a spell of warm weather that gets progressively hotter as the days go by. Then there’s an in-between day in which the wind blows and clouds clutter the sky. That night it invariably pours rain, great solid sheets of rain. The heavy rains only last several minutes before dialing back to a soaking rain that holds steady while waiting for the clouds to muster their resolve and once again hold forth. It’s like riding waves, but upside down: RUSH, pour-pour-pour, RUSH, pour-pour-pour.

After about 12 hours of this, the clouds are dragging close to the ground, ragged and worn out, and the temperature drops. For the next two days, maybe three, the clouds remain low and shredded. There is a steady, misty drizzle (called chipi-chipi) that hardly wets your hair interspersed with soft rains.

And then, finally, comes a day of almost no rain. As the cloud cover and humidity lessen, the temperature drops even further. It will be bittingly cold the next morning but that’s a sure sign that the sun will come out, whoo-hoo! In a couple days it will be hot enough to go swimming and wear shorts to bed and drink iced coffee, and the sky will be so blue that the grey clouds seem like nothing but a made-up memory.

Right now we’re on the last day of the rainy cycle, I think. It’s misting lightly and there’s supposed to be sun tomorrow.

But yesterday morning, in the middle of the cold and wet, I decided I could take it no longer.

While the kids were at school, I hopped on a bus and took off for Cobán and its fancy (Walmart) grocery store where I picked out four single bed comforters. By bundling up in jackets and socks, the kids had been staying warm at night, but just barely. It was time they each had their own insulating comforter.

When they came home after school and spied their newly made-up beds, the shouts of joy and screeches of glee were so intense that I actually felt bad. Were they that cold all this time? What kind of a mother would let her children shiver through their dreams? Also, could the cold night temps be the reason the youngest was have trouble with bladder control? Oh dear.

Last night when we gathered for bedtime reading, the kids trouped out to the drafty living area, their colorful, puffy, warm comforter wrapped tight about their shoulders. What bliss!

I go to bed each night hoping that the next day will bring warmer weather. I’m not asking for much—just a few hours of sun in which to thaw out would be plenty!

Written yesterday, on Friday, March 15.  This morning, it is weirdly raining while there is blue sky and the sun is shining, yes!

When we were stateside, one of our favored family traditions was Sunday popcorn and movie movie. We’d get a movie from Redbox or Netflix, and late Sunday afternoon, I’d commence with the popcorn making. Using my trusty whirley pop (bought in excellent condition for four dollars from a thrift store in Pennsylvania), I’d spend about half an hour cranking out batch after batch of popcorn—six in total, which is the equivalent of three cups of popcorn kernels. One batch was left salted and buttered, two batches were salted, buttered, and cheesed (with nutritional yeast), and three batches were salted, buttered, sugared, and spiced. Then we’d pile onto the sofa and my husband would tentatively bounce up and down and say, “This sofa is going to break one of these days,” and “we won’t be able to all fit on this much longer,” and then we’d start the movie and eat popcorn and apples till we bloated.

I contemplated bringing my whirley popper. I did, really. But then I thought, Nah, we’ll make do with kettles like they used to do in the olden days (like, back when I was a kid).

And that’s how it came to be that I’ve scorched batch after batch of popcorn here. I tried large, lightweight kettles and super-duper heavy-bottomed kettles and little teensy-tiny kettles. I tried stirring the popcorn until it started popping and then clapping the lid on and shaking wildly. I tried leaving the kernels to go about the business of exploding themselves undisturbed. I tried adding extra oil. I tried blue popcorn we brought from the States and regular yellow popcorn from here. Nothing worked.

And then I experimented with my big, flat metal pan—success! True, it was so shallow that I could hardly pop any popcorn in it at a time, and true I had to shake it so hard my butt about fell off, but we were eating popcorn!

One night my husband, sick of watching my butt almost fall off, I guess, scrubbed a couple nails and added them to the pan of oily kernels. In the shaking process, the nails rolled all over the pan, stirring up the kernels just like my whirley popper. I didn’t have to wiggle my butt nearly so hard. The next time, he upgraded from the lightweight nails to some heavy bolts.

And so now, every movie night, I take the bolts out of the mug where they’re stored with our few precious twisties and rubberbands, plunk them into the pan of oil and kernels, and shake us up a bunch of movie night popcorn.

The end.

PS. I bet Amanda doesn’t have Bolt Popcorn included in her Year of Popcorn series!

I’ve always loved grocery shopping. I love perusing the aisles, studying the options, dreaming, scheming, imagining. I love picking up the bags and boxes, puzzling over the ingredients, searching for something that I can’t quite find, admiring the novelty ingredients and wondering about the people who eat them. I love being surrounded by mountains of culinary potential. I love that everything in a grocery store centers around one of my very favorite activities: eating. Therefore, it only makes sense that I’d fall hard for the market with its mountains of fresh produce, sacks of dried chilis and beans and coffee, and slabs of meat hanging from hooks.

Even things that have nothing to do with food intrigue me. The men hawking large plastic bags to protect from the rain or pills for anything that might ail you.  The magician with his tricks and crowd of gawkers. The group of women squatting along the curb nursing their babies. The babies sleeping in empty crates tucked under the tables or right in the middle of the piles of melons and squashes (I am so tempted to point to a baby and inquire how much). The dog fights that never really take off thanks to some old lady with a cane calmly cracking them over the back. The men bent double with enormous sacks of food on their bags, and the women walking erect and regal with baskets of cloth-wrapped steaming tamales on their heads. The bargaining! The loudspeakers! The shouts and laughter! The tinkling of the ice cream man’s bell. The pat-pat-pat of fresh tortillas being made. The smell of fried chicken and raw meat and boiled corn and urine and fresh bread mingling together to create an olfactory sensation that will forever be imprinted on my mind.

Monday morning, the sun was shining, so I stuffed my camera into a shoulder bag and walked into town. I entered the crowded market and immediately slipped into a store where I squatted down, dug out my camera, and discreetly snapped a few pictures.

Once I got my bearings, I approached a couple women sitting on the curb outside the door. I asked them about their wares (banana leaves, squash vines, and something else I’m not familiar with) and if I might take a picture of them.

There was a space beside them, so I sat down and we commenced to talking. Turns out, one of the women was a Mennonite, and the other one had wanted to go to Bezaleel to study but wasn’t able to make it work out. We talked about food, school, and life in general, and I snapped a bunch of pictures of whatever struck my fancy.