RIP RIO RICO

Peter asked me “how is your place in Arizona”

me: it is big and cool. a mess of packaging materials right now, and the center of our lives in Rio Rico. We are excited to be leaving. It is very isolating down here, and substitute teaching is a painful way to make money. though, of course, the weather is pleasant, as I'm sure it is up there.

Rio Rico.

Our house, a cool expanse of ceramic tile and thin windows which rattle when the train heads north or south alongside the I-10 marked in kilometers, taking Chinese plastics down to Mexico, bringing furnished cars and firm produce to the north. Coming home from the middle school where Alexander teaches art in a room without a sink, crossing over the bridge, we feel it quaking from the weight of the semis stalled by myopic city planning, we wait silently for movement or a collapse. Semis line the city like sections of a great wall packed with waxed produce boxes of stickered mangos and tomatoes, oranges. The produce distributors and the schools. And a golf resort that sells land contracts to Midwesterners ready to retire to the sunny southwest.

I take myself to schools in the district to substitute for teachers. The kids are cruel and disrespectful and the only solace for me is the 12 dollars. I am an anchor in muddy water, waiting to take my shoes off and sip beer at the end of the day, trying to give out a lesson that was left, amidst a storm of Spanish words without leverage. Every new day they ask, “Miss, do you know Spanish” And I always respond, “un pocito”. I love to leave campus and sit in the hot dry car, letting the heavy warmth blanket my nerves.

The cockroaches crawl out of the drains, sprint across our floors. Next month the tarantulas will want to come inside from their hibernation in deep burrows along our house’s perimeter. Cling lays on the brick patio in the evening watching the migratory birds, and feeling the dry grass prickling through his thick fur.

Our neighbors are loud, always with something. Their cars speed through the court into their gravel driveway and skid to a halt, mariachi inspired pop music provides entertainment for their whole property, blasting through car stereos that cannot cover the bass notes, and too, rattle our windows. Their trash is offensive, excessive. Their dogs are aggressive. Every time they open or close the door to their huge American truck, they let the car alarm sound luxuriously, as if proud of the working device. The little girls through stones at our wall when they are not ridding around their flat tire bicycles.

Last week I bartered a watercolor portrait of someone for a weed-wacker, and now we can help even out what the cows have done for our lawn.