I haven't been gone all that long, but the visit to Target today -- to load up on laundry soap and other household essentials -- took my breath away.
The abundance. The clean sparkling shelves.
This boy is hammering nails. Used and bent nails. To make them straight again, to sell in the market or on the street.
Taken two weeks ago in Guatemala City, a short plane ride from Chicago, but miles removed from all that we have, all that we use without gratitude, all that we discard.
7 comments:
Beautiful. I'm glad you're back home, safe and healthy. Thank you for sharing so much with us, and for your wonderful insight. I love this post.
I had that same feeling when I was in Cancun for the first time. The Hotel Zone is an overwhelmingly built up place of hotels, restaurants, clubs, malls, etc. We went into Cancun proper for reasons I don't remember. The city of Cancun is a very modest place with plenty of people who didn't have much money at all. In the middle of city was this giant Walmart. It was just as you describe: clean, sparkling, with shelves and shelves of brand new merchandise. Very strange to have all that abundance in a place like that.
I don't come here very often, but when I do I am struck by the lovely museum quality of your blog. I always feel like I'm wandering in a beautiful gallery when I'm here.
I wondered if you have collections of things at home to fit the museum image I have of you. Original paintings from Latin America? Exotic pinned beetles? Native American pottery? Your own dinosaur skeleton?
paintings and pottery, yes. pinned beetles and dinosaur bones, sadly no.
(although I think we do have a piece of coprolite hanging around somewhere, and I'm a nut for insects in amber)
i should probably also mention that i'm really quite messy. not at all museum-like. ;)
For a time, I thought I should make my blog more like yours, elegant and poetic. But as I've been pondering these things lately, I've realized there is a place for everyone and that your style of doing things doesn't fit with me.
Thanks for responding.
MT
what an interesting comment -- I wonder if we can "make" our blogs anything at all -- it seems to me that blogging forces honesty out of us all, in the end, and reveals things about ourselves (to ourselves, and to anyone who's listening) that maybe we don't even know.
:)
Heavens! You have hit the nail on the head! Perhaps that's the reason why I thought my blog should be more like yours. Yours is so restrained and elegant. It seems like all I do is wrench my emotions all over the place on my blog. Lately, I have taken to removing some of odder, more brutally honest assessments of what's bothering the hell out of me a few hours after they're posted.
Thanks for the insight. Have a great weekend.
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