Nuria in Costa Rica

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon. When I got up this morning at O-dark hundred hours, the temperature was 13°F. Or maybe it was 16°, I'm not sure. It was early in the day. But now the sky is sunny and blue and the afternoon temperature is 35°F at 2:30 PM. I'm sitting at my PC with my electric space heater blowing warm air on my legs. Sun streams through the front windows to my right. The house is very quiet. 

My domestic partner, Nuria, is in Costa Rica. She was born there and her family is there. Also, all her doctors are there. So she goes back to Costa Rica once a year to visit her doctors and her family. She'll stay there for a month and then return to Virginia. She's been complaining about the heat there. She even bought an electric fan to help cool her at night. That's what living in America for a year will do to you. You get accustomed to things like spring weather, air conditioning in the summer, perfect autumn days. Even the cold days of winter are manageable. You can always dress warmer, throw on a sweater under your coat, etc., but you can only dress "cooler" to a point. Costa Rica is hot. That's why they call this season summer, even though technically it's winter. Costa Rica only has two seasons: hot (winter) and rainy (summer). In their rainy season, the rain falls hard every day. 

When I was a kid, one of my chores was to water my mother's plants every week. She had plants in all the windows of all the rooms, plus plants in the upstairs windows. I hated watering them. Why did she have all those plants if she didn't want to take care of them? I was a kid, and I had a dog. A dog is much more practical than a plant. It can run around and be your friend and do tricks. A plant just sits in the window looking green. If you water it. Otherwise, it looks brown. This is one of the many things I don't understand about women. Nuria goes to the trouble of getting these various types of plants for the windows, then she flies off to Central America and leaves her precious plants in my clumsy hands. She even wrote down instructions: 1½ small "cups" of water for the plants in the living room on Saturdays, 1½ "cups" of water for the ferns in the kitchen window on Saturdays and Wednesdays — don't water the aloe. I put "cups" in quotes because I don't mean a measuring cup, but rather a small plastic cup that pudding comes in. Wait—when Nuria wrote "cup", did she mean 8 ounces or 4 ounces? Now I'm not sure. I think I may have screwed up.

Nuria is going to spend two days and a night at a beach. The sun is blisteringly hot in Costa Rica, as in any Central American country. I'm sure she will be wise and sit under a beach umbrella. I've gotten sunburned at the beach just from sunlight reflected off the white sand. (Nuria, if you read this: use sunblock.) Then she has several more appointments to keep and then she'll return in February. I hope she brings some good weather back with her. The weather when I took her to the airport in Richmond was bloody awful. As was the traffic on I-95. But "if I live and nothing happens" (as my grandmother was given to saying) I'll be at the Richmond Airport when she arrives.