Derrumbas

Salómon laughed out loud when I told him about the landslide on the way to Santa Catarina Juquila, and of my surprise when they built a makeshift road to drive right over it. "Claro! (of course!)," he declared. I told him that where I come from they would have to move the whole thing out of the way before the cars could pass, that there would be laws or something.

Salómon knew enough about the US to understand, and he got quite a kick out of it. He told me that in Mexico such things were so common that you just learned to go around them, over them, or through. He said they called them derrumbas, that the original meaning of the word is "things that collapse," but it's come to describe anything that gets in the way on the path. "Derrumba!", he shouted, as he swerved around a rooster. "Derrumba!", he pointed, as a palm frond tumbled down a river where the road used to be. "Derrumbas! Derrumbas! Todos son derrumbas," he laughed.

As I write now, I'm wearing earplugs to drown out the shrill sound of a saw cutting tiles for the kitchen floor of the new Filipino restaurant that's going in beneath my apartment. I sit here just above where the grill will be, and know I will soon have to move. This will be the fourth time I've had to move since I started this blog, all for unusual and annoying reasons.

Despite powerpoints, exams, long work days, technical difficulties, construction noise, heartache, and moving, this blog keeps going in its fight for a creative life. Like La Divina Concepcion or Salómon's taxi, it drives over, around, and through the obstacles. In the times where it feels too uncomfortable to bear I hear a faint whisper, an echo through earplugs, of Salómon's laughter, "Derrumbas, derrumbas, todos son derrumbas!"