Eating Guacamole

Avocados are EVERYWHERE right now. I would eat them in my house, I would eat them with a mouse. In my pueblo, they go for 5 to 10 pesos, which is about $0.13 to $0.26 each. I eat a lot of avocado.
My basic recipe for guacamole is avocado, olive oil, garlic, and salt. You can add tomato, onion, or ginger too. You can add it to scrambled eggs (makes green eggs, ham is extra), pasta, eggplant, fried plantains, rice and beans… almost anything you can buy at a colmado.
I promised one of the women in literacy class that I’d make her guacamole the next time I bought avocados (which was later that night, but I ended up eating all of it while standing in the kitchen), so I mixed some up last night and brought it over with some bread. She inhaled the whole tub while standing next to the table (that’s how you know she’s good people), and pulled out an article on the Dominican political system. Then, she proceeded to read the first paragraph out loud. She struggled with a few words, but had no problems with “legislativo,” “ejecutivo,” and “judicial.” Which is crazy, and so far from the “la, le, li, la, lu” and “ra, re, ri, ro, ru” exercises from class. She was actually reading, not just guessing the sounds; I was blown away. I should have brought more guacamole.
We talked about cooking, which Dominican foods I like, and how hard she has worked to learn to read and write, and how many years it has taken me to speak Spanish like a third grader. She tried to explain the perfect way to cook rice using measurements on her index finger, but it was lost on me. Her house is identical to mine, but feels worn-in and lived in, instead of a mostly-empty shell with piles of clothes on top of duffle bags and a small table with one chair in the corner. She even had a picture of Leonel Fernandez, the presidente, on the wall in true Dominican fashion.

I was in a really good mood when I got home, so I filled all my water buckets and mopped my house for the second time ever, and immediately regretted buying the baby-scented floor soap. Why would you want to mop your house with a baby? Do they also make baby-flavored toothpaste? I went to sleep that night with the overpowering scent of nurseries and nursing homes wafting not-quickly-enough out the window, and had a bizarre recurring dream where it’s 5 minutes before my first-year economics class, and I just realized I didn’t write the term paper due that day. Right when the TA who didn’t know my name was about to ask for it, I was awoken by a neighbor blasting Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, and the woman next door yelling at a goat that wandered onto my front lawn. The babies were still in full force.