No Storms In Paradise

There are no storms in paradise.

Our house is antiquated Nicaraguan perfection, nestled up in a back alley on the very edge of the mountain town, its back to the chaotic rainforest that screeched its existence to the human settlement below. The walls inside were painted a caramel brown and decorated with genuine artifacts from the region, the floors a strong tile that reminded me of stucco rooftops, and the windowpanes were built to remain open. Permanently.

    Why not? There are no storms in paradise.

    Within my first week, I learned to love the cool mountain breeze that floated down the forest behind us, entered our house to brush my cheeks, and continue out the front door.

    The roosters would cry their song. The same song. A never changing song. It rang through the house day and night, a cuckoo clock living in perpetuity. There was no weather change rolling through, inspiring them to change their tune. I learned to sleep as easy as my own baby, listening to their shrieks the way my baby would listen to my own heartbeat. It became a part of the walls, the ceiling, the mountain breeze, the sound of singing squawks. The animals invaded my rainforest home, letting me know that I was on their land now. Cats wandered in and out of the house of their own accord, glancing disdainfully at me when I shrieked in surprise. Carpenter ants cast impossibly long shadows across the tile floors when the evening lamplight struck their sides, marching their latest leaf cuttings right out our iron-wrought gate that replaced the front door.

Whether I welcomed the creatures, or whether I didn’t, it didn’t matter. I was only human, after all. This was the rainforest, a true paradise.

And as we all should know by now, there are no storms in paradise.

I had never cooked before I lived there. Raised American, I was an expert on ordering through windows, through the phone, and often through my friends and family. But in the rainforest, they have yet to install the latest coffee shop amongst the howler monkeys lurking in the trees. If my husband was going to eat, I was going to learn how to cook. I purchased raw ingredients, potatoes, milk and bread, vegetables that I didn’t recognize. The fruits were my favorite options. The beans were the worst.

I could boil water, mash and dice potatoes, harden eggs to perfection, and the little toaster oven I purchased made the cutest little pieces of toast with whatever topping I like. But beans required washing, rinsing, boiling, rinsing, washing again, then boiling. I never knew when they were done. I wasn’t about to ask my neighbors. I was a stranger, a foreigner, and I kept myself to myself, where I was sure I belonged while borrowing time in paradise. I cooked every meal, ensured the three of us had food when we needed it, and accepted the frightening responsibility that I had never considered – life revolves around food. And someone had to provide the food.

Within a month, my husband insisted we try to make compost for our garden that didn’t exist, and he affixed a thin plastic bag to the cabinet door. I was instructed to put all food waste from the meals I was cooking into the bag. I didn’t like it, and I tried to argue. I spent all the time in the kitchen. I was responsible to clean the house afterwards – it was, after all, my own desire to keep the house clean. The putrid smells from that bag full of rotten banana peels and moulding potato skins moved permanently into my nose. But I did as he told me.

After all, there are no storms in paradise.

It only took a few days before that bag burst from the fumes and writhing white maggots crawled across the clean tile floors.

Sometimes my baby girl would get fussy, and nothing seemed to calm her. On a burst of inspiration, I grabbed her by the hands, and whispered, “Let’s go find a new flower!”

She hadn’t learned to walk yet, despite her being nearly a year older than most walking toddlers, but her smile radiated out, piercing my heart. I swept her into my arms, and without a word to my husband – where was my husband? – I took her out the iron gate and onto the dirt path outside our house.

When you live in a place like paradise, the weather is constant. Golden sunrays every morning, baking the dirt paths with the same throbbing beat as the footfalls of the locals who run into town. A dusting of rain every afternoon, that was soaked up by earth and leaves alike, cooling the air as evening approached. And yet I had noticed in just a few weeks: the variety of blooming plants changed as time passed. New flowers, new leaves, new green shapes were constantly unfurling along the streets and hanging down from the massive trees above.

My baby girl accepted every flower I picked; her tears left behind inside the house. She squashed a myriad of petals and stems in her chubby hands, not wanting to drop a single one, not wanting to crush any either. I bit my lip, watching with amusement as she struggled with her choice: to keep every crushed flower, or only a single perfect one?

But for her, it was never a choice. She never let go. And the two of us brought quite a few crushed petals back into the house every time she began to cry.

The perfect temperature, sunny paradise, felt strange sometimes. I laid in my bed for hours, listening to my baby girl cry. I knew I wasn’t allowed to go to her, to comfort her. My heart break at her sorrow, soaking pitch into my soul. Black seemed to bleed into the corners of my vision as the hours went on. And yet, I followed his rules. And outside, the warm, friendly sun shone on, giving life to the rainforest.

I earned all the money for our family, and since I spent my earliest hours locked onto a computer, between midnight and breakfast, I tended to avoid all things electronic after that. I didn’t check the news, or read my phone, or anything, when I thought about it.

Why check the news when you live in paradise?

The most frightening aspect of the rainforest was removing a growing hornet nest inside your own home. A feat that I succeeded at. The country’s tumultuous history was a memory. A footnote on our walks into town.

“Oh, I recognize those three holes along that wall. That’s where those rebels were executed back in the 1980’S.”

I didn’t speak aloud about the dark stains on the concrete beneath it.

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It would begin like clockwork. The sun would rise, bake the dirt, the birds would sing by the window, the roosters would crow—the roosters would always crow, and as soon as the townspeople would get back into their homes with their morning groceries, the fighting would begin.

The locals had started using fireworks today, against the police force that was closing it’s grasp around the mountain town. I had wondered if they used rifles or pistols, or maybe machetes designed to cut ivy shone in the sunlight before it was splattered with red.

I only knew that because after a morning watching my baby girl play with wooden letters, counting the seconds until 10:00, I would stand carefully, walk with silent footfalls to the perilously open iron grate that made up our front door, and face the direction of the town’s center. It was out of sight, but I could hear the violence, a sound that snaked its way up my spine. Today, instead of shouting, crying, and the pop of a weapon, I heard the distinct whine, blast, and hiss of a firework. Then another. Then a quick succession of four or five hits, and wondered if any of those targeted fireworks had hit their mark on another human.

The sun was still hot, but not too hot. It looked like it would rain again, this afternoon.

I turned, and my daughter was on the floor, singing to herself. She had just taken her first steps, in this very house, a few weeks past. Just in time, and of course, in her own time.

I was the one who had brought her here.

Thankfully, my husband was still in bed, and he’d likely sleep past noon again. When he was sleeping, he wasn’t shouting at me. He hated when I got frightened.

My phone flashed an update, and forgetting what I was trying to forget, I opened the internet, only to see our friend Marie, a local who helped us clean up sometimes, posting live on her page. The police had thrown several gas bombs into her home. She hadn’t been able to grab both her infant boy and her elderly father before she escaped. She couldn’t breathe. She was crying.

But of course.

There are no storms in paradise.