Las Terrenas 2023: Good Fortune
POST 54: February 8, 2023
As soon as I woke up yesterday, our third morning in Las Terrenas, I threw open the door to the rooftop porch next to our bedroom and was greeted by the sight of a rainbow. This was no vague, "maybe I will get colorful or perhaps I'll just fade away" rainbow: this was an "every ROY G BIV color clearly delineated, loud and proud" rainbow. I visually traced its arc from a clump of distant palm trees to a nearby house with a cool catwalk, and was actually annoyed by another rainbow's feeble attempt to form above it. The intruder was pathetic and faded away, as it deserved.
I eventually skipped down the stairs--well, no, I didn't literally skip because I am a total klutz (more on that in a few paragraphs), but mentally I was frolicking--and was greeted with not one, not two, but THREE additional good omens: someone else had already made coffee, my friend had awoken to the sound of turtledoves, and the infant gecko that had been squashed in the kitchen shutters apparently had come back to life.
Someone else making coffee is an obvious good thing. Waking to the sound of turtledoves: well, I wouldn't know a turtledove's coo from any other sweet chirping bird's, but it sure sounded like a good omen. Recognizing the sound from her childhood in East Germany, Antje assured me that it was a positive sign.
Our friends Antje and Fritz flew down here with us on Saturday. When we left at 8:00 a.m., the temperature--without windchill, mind you--was -10 F. I refused to wear a coat, and running from our front door to the Lyft in just a sweater and jeans was painful. Thanks to frozen fuel and sparse ground crews in Boston, we missed our connecting flight through JFK and landed in Santo Domingo at 11:30 p.m. When I stepped out of the SDQ airport and into 80 degrees F with matching humidity, my sweater and jeans were painful for the exact opposite reasons they had been in Boston. NOT that I was complaining about the sweat trickling down my spine.
All of that was to explain who the heck Fritz and Antje are and that, in our gratitude for escaping the Arctic Blast of the Century, or whatever hyperbole the weather forecasters were using, we were highly attuned to signs of our good fortune. Including the Miracle of the Squashed Gecko.
Antje was closing the shutters between the kitchen and the outdoor eating area and I was behind her washing dishes when she screamed in exactly the same tone I would've used if I'd seen a snake. So, instead of asking whether she'd cut off a limb or was otherwise injured, I yelled, "Is it a snake? Did you see a snake?"
"No, it has legs," Antje sputtered.
Reassured, I ventured outdoors to see her pointing at a gecko that was so young that its skin was nearly see-through. Unfortunately, it had been smushed in the shutters.
My husband had by this time run down the stairs from our bedroom. He's not as klutzy as I am, and, being more empathetic, he was concerned for Antje's physical well-being. Gabe rolled his eyes when he saw the dead gecko and suggested that we deal with the carcass, which was still attached to the shutter, later.
When we returned from dinner, the decidedly dead gecko was gone. Eaten by some other animal that climbed a good ways to get it? Never really there but just a figment of our collective imaginations? Resurrected? We were all going with the latter--which, incidentally, seemed to be the winner when we opened the shutters the yesterday morning and a baby gecko of the exact same size was smashed in the shutters again.
The rainbow, the turtledoves, the Miracle of the Squashed Gecko: good omens all, we thought. But then, on the way to the fresh juice shack, we met three young Estonians whose hotel room had been robbed. A mere hour later, I was in a pristine nail salon, searching for a blue-green that would make my toenails the color of the Sargasso Sea. As I was putting a not-quite-right color of polish back on the shelf, that bottle whacked into a bottle of black nail polish, which launched several feet into the air and shattered onto the ceramic floor, spraying broken glass and black nail polish on to the pale green walls, the white shelves, and the floor. I guess the good omen was that the woman getting a manicure nearby did not sustain any injuries or splatters. After many "disculpes," which I said so many times that the Spanish for "excuse me" is permanently wedged into my brain, and a guilt-ridden pedicure, I gave Diana a 75% tip and fled in embarrassment as soon as the Ready, Fete, Go polish dried on my toenails.
"Well, I'm glad we didn't play the lottery," I reflected to myself on my way back to our villa. Because of the several seemingly good omens, the four of us had raised the possibility but quickly discarded it on the grounds that we aren't gamblers and, given the language barrier, we might accidentally end up investing in a Ponzi scheme.
When I got back to the villa, I stretched out on the warm wooden deck and dangled my legs in the pool. I admired my newly painted toenails, then looked upward into the Shore is Something! blue sky, punctuated only by the leaves of several palm trees swaying in the wind.
Good omens, I realized, were beside the point. By the random luck of being born into a middle-class family in the United States, I had won the lottery of opportunity. Instead of looking for good omens, I should enjoy and appreciate the amazing good fortune that I have,
And I do, I assure you.