First Day of Summer

Happy Summer!

I love heat, and we have it in abundance here.  Wherever you are, I hope that you are caressed by the sun and feel God’s love around you.

I have two snippets to share- just snapshots, really, of this past week:

1.  Karl and I were snorkeling the  other day after ripping the entire floor out of the upstairs bathroom.  (Tangent – it is really scary to rip the floor up when all that is beneath you are a few beams.  Currently our bathroom ceiling on the second floor is the ceiling for the hallway of the first floor… I’m so glad I have a husband who knows how to build things.)  Anyway.  While we were snorkeling I spotted a hawksbill turtle below me.  I got Karl’s attention and we floated above the turtle and just savored watching him.  He was on the bottom, about 10 feet below us in crystal clear water.  He had backed himself under a rock that had a low hanging shelf like area.  That turtle – probably about 18 inches in diameter, reminded me of an old bear as he scratched his shell on that rock.  Since I am a lover of all things turtle, I know that the feeling they have in their shells is akin to how our fingernails feel, so I’m guessing that he was actually scraping away barnacles or other debris, but what it looked like to me was that he was giving himself a good back scratch.   Thank you, Mr. Hawksbill, for allowing us to witness your moment.

2.  St. Croix is only 600 miles from the equator, so it is a given that living here also means living with a plethora of bugs.  We have ants, several different kinds, who  frequent our kitchen counter (it is really dry here and I’m told they are looking for water.  I try to tell them that there is an entire SEA just a mile away, but they heed me not!) We have millipedes, which actually look like rolly-pollys on steroids – they mostly stay outside.  We have really huge and creepy centipedes that live under pieces of wood or tree branches.  They can bite and send you to the ER, so I’m very careful not to get up close and personal with them.  Last night, I met a new bug.  We had been reading upstairs before going to sleep, and I went down to go to the bathroom (since the upstairs bathroom is now a hole!) and to get a drink.  I didn’t turn the light on in the kitchen, I just reached into the frig for a bottle of water.  By the romantic light of the frig, a bug the size of a small field mouse jumped out of one of the kitchen cabinets and then stopped to stare at me.  With 2 inch- long feelers.  Yikes.  Of course I yelled, not really a scream no matter how Karl will later tell this story, and jumped back.  By the time I got the light on and Karl had flown down the stairs to save me from whatever, he had disappeared.  I spotted him in the small space between the wall and the frig finally.  Karl sent me for the vacuum and managed to suck him up.  Apparently, roaches in the tropics don’t just live in filthy hovels, they sometimes visit nice homes, too.  And though I’ve read that roaches can survive a nuclear blast, Karl assures me that this one couldn’t have survived being sucked up in the vacuum.  I have my doubts, and I’m not emptying the vacuum canister this time, he’ll have to do it!