With no indoor plumbing and none to be found within 100 yards, she learned to use the rainforest as one freshly scented outhouse. With only one light bulb in her casita, she learned to get out of her rainforest hiking gear and into pajamas in less than a minute at night (any longer and the light attracted the entire inhabitants of the rainforest into her casita).
Despite the lesson taught by the light bulb, this jungle woman learned to live with her nightly roommates (a scorpion, a tarantula, a mother rat and her six babies that crawled on the woman and pooped on her pillow at night, several cockroaches the size of her thumb, a lizard that did pushups whenever the woman returned to her casita, an entire wall covered in Daddy-Long-Legs, army ants that stung, and seven semi-venomous that dangled down from Jungle Woman's ceiling above her head in the morning.
She awoke at dawn to the sound of howler monkeys bellowing from the surrounding cloud forest mountains and to some type of reptile that said "fuck you" in a croak. The cool mountain air drifted away as the tropical sun warmed the tin roof of Jungle Woman's casita. She tipped her black rubber boots over to dislodge any scorpion stowaways, threw her damp curly hair into yet another knot, and tried to get her pants to button (that tropical fried food was just too damn good to turn down seconds).
And then that Jungle Woman opened her door to the world - the lush, abundant, diverse, rich world of green and red and yellow and white - and breathed in deeply. Today was another day of having the most amazing time of her life. A day like all the others in the two years she lived there that she won't forget, can't forget and thinks about every single day.
(Click the image above for a free issue of The Motherhood Muse, where you can find out more about my casita as well as writings about motherhood and nature!)
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