Home of Our Own

Our new two-bedroom, one-bath home was built up on stilts in the common style intended to protect homes from flooding during monsoon-type rains or, worse, hurricanes. A driveway led to a sheltered area under the house, where we parked the ranch wagon. The house was wooden with clapboard siding painted white and with dark green shutters and trim. The roof was unpainted corrugated galvanized steel—locally called zinc—that reflected the brilliant sun.

It really was a very nice little house. The rooms were quite large, with ten-foot ceilings for coolness, large windows, and adequate closet space.

Bucher and I took the front bedroom and settled the two children in the other. Alex may have missed his private bedroom, bath, and his own small, screened yard opening from them in the Sarasota house, but Carli probably was happy to have company in her strange surroundings.

We had repainted the living/dining room area before moving in, replacing an insipid pink with dark green walls set off by stark white ceiling and woodwork. Bucher designed and had built a mahogany book case, large enough to be used as a room divider but able to be moved from one to another of what became a long procession of rental houses in Belize.

Some while after we moved in, our kitchen was outfitted with apartment-size appliances that we had bought second hand in the U.S. and shipped down. The gas stove was a special delight and relief. Before it arrived, I was a hazard to myself, the house, and most of wood-built Belize City, operating our borrowed Coleman stove. Mother taught me too well that matches were dangerous and their tiny flames have been a horror to me all my life. Perhaps that is one reason I never smoked.

The stove-lighting routine of turning a knob, pumping up the fuel tank, priming the burner, lighting a match, and waiting to make sure that the stove was operating correctly, intimidated, but did not defeat me. In justice to that Coleman stove, which we were grateful to have had loaned to us, I must admit that although it was older than I, it was a gem, once one accepted its idiosyncrasies, and my own.

 

The house was not screened; most weren’t. The mosquitoes were bad at night and the flies became ghastly shortly after we moved in (they are somewhat seasonal). There were the equivalent of two or three lots behind us before the next house but everyone kept poultry, so I had visions of typhoid, yellow fever, typhus, malaria, and Other Hideous Tropical Diseases with every bug I saw.

Bucher quickly ordered the traditional wood-framed screens that could be fitted into the lower opening of a double-hung window and removed when the window had to be closed against sudden, torrential tropical rains. Somehow the rains preferred to come in the middle of the night and waken only me, so I was the one who had to stand half-naked in blowing rain while I wrestled screens out of the opening so I could close windows against the deluge.

Bucher also screened the front porch. Open to the prevailing breezes, it became a favored spot. Bucher reinforced the screening with heavy hardware cloth so that, with the porch door bolted, we could leave the living room door wide open for extra ventilation without worrying about intruders, winged or shod.

 

The proposed fence of white picketing had not yet been built by the time we moved in. Without a fence, we were at the mercy of casual thieves. My Midwestern propriety was outraged when Bucher’s underthings disappeared from the clothesline under the house. A little later someone walked off with a new pair of slacks that Bucher had bought on a quick trip to Atlanta. I had hand-washed them to make sure they were handled carefully. When the police asked how much they had cost, I could not answer because we had not yet received the bill. We spoke to Dickey, our landlord, again about our missing fence.

 

When we were settled, Bucher built a playhouse for the children. Their grandparents sent from Michigan a set of playground equipment with swing, climbing rope, ladder, and teeter-totter, which delighted our two and attracted playmates because this sort of yard “toy” is rare in Belize.

Alex was a new person. He had his tools and there was the usual scrap pile under the house that you get from a new building, so he stayed there in the shade two-thirds of the day.

And two little boys that Alex met in the park came calling the day we moved in and came to play frequently thereafter. They were beautifully behaved children and Alex was happy as a prince playing host and having company.

Each school day, Alex walked the curving half-block to the grilled gate into St. Catherine’s. Carli missed Alex through the hours when he was in school, though fortunately she had a few playmates in the neighborhood and Colleen McNabb’s nursemaid brought her over from the Fort George at least once a day, so Carli had company.