Wildlife.

Critters! This was a friendly pigeon next to a neighbor’s table at a cafe. :)

The thing about where I live is that it is the most incredibly beautiful place, and also you have to learn to like critters, or at least co-exist with them.

We love critters. We draw the line at some of them. For example, the family of scorpions that Kenya found in her bed one night. But how can we draw the line, really? We aren’t in charge here, THEY ARE.

Here is a list of the things that live on our property at any one time, sometimes in our house.

frogs (many kinds)

toads

crabs

blue-headed lizards,

skinks,

snakes,

rhinoceros beetles,

beetles of more descriptions than I can offer,

cicadas,

ants—so, so many ants

huntsman spiders

many other spiders

cockroaches

geckos

touqays (like giant geckos, very loud)

mice

rats

worms

centipedes

millipedes

sparrows

mynahs

bulbuls

greater coucals (arm birds)

butterflies

moths

wasps (especially mud wasps— i found a nest on one of my original paintings the other day!)

bees (there is a hive in the rice barn)

and more other flies, mosquitoes, and bugs than we can even quantify

the animals that tend to live in the house with us are frogs, crabs (they hang out in the shower), geckos, and all kinds of bugs. Sometimes people say, “You have a huge spider in your bathroom,” and we say, “That’s right, she lives there.”

Part of this is due to my—what should I call it—laissez-faire approach to life? I often don’t change things even when they really should be changed. It seems that they must be that way for a reason, who am I to question?

And then maybe I blink and realize, oh yes, this is my house; if I want the critters to leave, I have to shoo them away. I notice this most when I am with friends who optimize things. They change things. They ask me if I want them to change things for me. They ask me why I haven’t changed things already. They use words like, “this could work better,” or, “this would be easier if…”

It’s like a superpower that I do not possess. Things are just the way they are, here for me to observe and write about. This is how my brain works.

Anyhow. I have a story for you, and I promise we will come back to critters eventually.

The story starts at the dentist. I was there with Chinua and Kenya, the support for their work that day. I was the driver. Kenya’s was minimal, a five minute tightening of her braces, but Chinua’s was more extensive. He needed a dental surgery, so they took his blood pressure and that was when they noticed that it was extremely high. The kind of high where they bring in more than one machine because they are convinced that the first one must be broken. That high. He went ahead and got the dental surgery that he has been needing for years (praise be!) and then the next day, we put Kenya on the bus to come home and I drove Chinua, who was in a fair amount of pain from the surgery, to the hospital to talk to his doctor about a medication switch.

Our plans all got a little squirrelly at that point, because they were concerned about my dear Superstar husband and wanted to do many tests and say many SCARY WORDS (like clot, or infarction) about what might be wrong with him. They admitted him to the ICU (SCARY) and I drove home over the mountains to get some clothes and prepare for a stay at the hospital. It’s a three hour drive and it was late when I left, so I drove in the dark and I let myself cry a bit. I let myself think about the unthinkable. And then I went back to what I have learned about big scares:

View out the hospital window.

One thing at a time.
Don’t rush into the possible loss of a possible future.
Just do the next thing.

So I drove and prayed and got home late. I slept and then went to Shekina Garden and cooked the Sunday community lunch. (Of course, Ro and Winnie offered to do it for me, but I felt that cooking lunch would steady my soul, and I didn’t know what was coming over the next weeks. Surgery? Long days in the hospital? I didn’t know when we would be back.)

While I was cooking, though, I got a text from Chinua, who had already seen the cardiologist. “Nothing is wrong with my heart. It looks good.”

(I could have told them that his heart was expansive and beautiful, a wonderful specimen, full of music and creative worlds. But I’ll take “nothing is wrong.”)

There was still that pesky sky-high blood pressure, though, so I packed my backpack and drove back over the mountains to my Love. The kids were pretty incredible. Kai and Kenya, previously the little scamps who used to sit on the Leaf Baby when I tried to use the bathroom, are now fully-fledged adults, calm and responsible. So I was free to drive back to Chinua. Hospitals in Asia often have a policy that a loved one has to stay in the hospital room with a patient, so the choice was even removed for me. I had to go. I wanted to go.

So we spent two days in the hospital room together. Other than the fact that Chinua was hooked up to IVs and that people came in to talk to us about blah blah blah medicines and kidneys and sleep tests, it was like a long date. A weekend away.

It was restful. I love my husband, and I just like to be with him.

But the nurses, one day, when I was out looking for food, asked Chinua, “Did you see a frog?”

“A frog?” he asked. Was it some kind of test? He didn’t say anything to me about it until we were driving back home, over the mountains again, and I yelped VERY LOUDLY. I pulled over quickly to the side of the road.

A frog had jumped onto my gas pedal foot, surprising and cold and slightly damp. I pulled over because I didn’t want it to go under the pedal, I didn’t want to squish it. We managed to pick it up and send it off into the jungle with words of blessing, and then Chinua told me about the frog in the hospital room. Frog in the hospital room. Frog making itself known after hours of driving in the car.

There are two possibilities here, folks. Or endless ones, really, but let’s focus on two:

1, The frogs were one and the same. This little guy hopped out of my backpack, explored the hotel room, then back into my bag and into the car when we left.

2, and I think this is more likely, I brought TWO frogs with me to the hospital. One in my backpack somehow and one in the car. The backpack frog now lives in the hospital or has escaped in someone else’s bag. The car frog hung out in the car in the parking long for a few days, then said hello by jumping on my foot while I was driving. Now he lives in the jungle between Pai and Chiang Mai.

What this means to me is that even when Chinua and I are doing our best to be hospital people, in rooms with tiles and white walls, and machines and elevators, we somehow still bring wildlife with us. We bring frogs. What must those nurses have thought? It makes me laugh.

Light at home.

We’ve been home for a while now. I’m still processing all of it, and Chinua definitely is because he’s figuring out meds and his new machine for sleep apnea, and all the other things that are coming along right now. We are immensely thankful that his health checked out in so many ways. We are navigating health challenges that come from growing up, being adults in the middle of our lives.

And yet, we are still us, still bringing wildlife everywhere we go, even when we are being proper city people, even when we leave our kids at home. Frogs jump on board.