Dusty Drives in Hot Trucks

The ants numbered in the thousands, as ants tend to do. Moving like water, the tiny black creatures appeared seemingly from nothing, spilling out over the piles of dirty, dusty towels on the laundry room floor.

Fall in line, they did not, as their ranks scattered and panicked, a panic which spread to me while their chaotic frenzy began to sweep towards my feet.

I’ve never seen ants in my laundry room, and I’m unsure if they were searching for a water source (it’s very hot and dry this month here in Nicaragua). Perhaps they found a bag or towel stained with something scrumptious they could carry back to their compound.

God forbid they have built a compound in my laundry room.

I don’t know what the ant situation is because, as the hurried ants covered every surface within seconds, I dropped whatever garment I was holding, and bolted.

This is not how I usually handle challenges: slamming the door and running away. But it’s how I handled this one.

When it comes to overcoming challenges or problem-solving, I’d like to say I’m fairly resourceful. Thoughtful, definitely. Strategic, often. Determined, usually.

My pattern is that the more complex the challenge, the better I perform.  Let’s take cooking, for example, or any activity in the kitchen. I can prepare a mean pasta sauce, slicing, salting, and cooking down fresh tomatoes and eggplant.  I sauté red onion and garlic, then slide the hot veggies into the blender, throwing in half a jalepeño if I’m feeling spicy. Sometimes locally grown kale is tossed in to up the iron count.

Back in the pot, I freely add red wine, heaps of oregano, basil, black pepper, and turmeric without measure, and cook down the sauce until it’s the perfect consistency for pasta.  Chopped and slightly sautéed zucchini are added to chunk it up, grated parmesan at the ready, and voilà!  Dinner is served!  This pot of sauce will feed me for a week, if I’m lucky. And if I don’t share.

Bread, on the other hand, I will burn every time.  It doesn’t matter if the bread is toasting in an oven, which will alert me with a cheerful “ding!”.  I’ll register the ding and then ignore it until I smell burning. It’s a simple task I rarely master.

The same with tortillas.  I prefer to lay each tortilla across the open flame of the stove, where they will bubble and blacken to slightly toasted perfection. I said I “prefer” this method.  In reality, I lay the tortillas two at a time on the open flame and then walk away to watch a movie.

Okay, maybe I don’t watch a movie, but my attention is instantly zapped up by something far more interesting than fire-warming tortillas, and up they go in smoke.  If they are the last tortillas in the bag, swear words fly up as well.  It takes perhaps 3, maybe 4 seconds to heat a tortilla, but more than half of the time, my attention pivots, and breakfast is ruined.

Those are mild examples of challenges, the big or small problems they pose, and the patterns I tend to follow in working around them. For bigger problems, I roll up both sleeves and dig in, like perfecting pasta sauce I make from scratch.  The smaller problems, like toasting bread, I tend to not think about too much.

The last few weeks have had their share of challenges, less in cooking, but more in life and in business.  Often, if a problem can’t be solved with a conversation or a computer, for me, it can be solved by taking a good old-fashioned drive.

A good long drive opens up time for a good long think. The time in between the start and end points, and the thoughts that romp this way and that.  The problems that are pondered over, hoping to arrive at a solution before arriving at my destination.

Lately, the roads are chaotic, pitted, and dustier than is fair.

Bordered by simple homes, spotted with dusty chickens and muddy pigs, drivers are called to pay attention to the rocky pits, the blind curves, and the bolting farm animals.  The collarless dogs and pups that don’t discern a front yard from the road.

Roo was once one such collarless pup.

My truck currently sports one window that won’t roll up, two windows that won’t roll down, and a three-legged dog navigating from the back seat, hanging her head out the fourth window, which is stuck half up or half down, depending on how optimistic we are.

The daily drives this past week have created a bumpy space for thoughts to run amok. My truck breathes in the dust, I breathe out worrisome thoughts, trying to work around the challenges peppering my day to day.

It has been a few weeks of launching new programs with new business partners, visiting with old friends, and welcoming new clients. This is busy work, fraught with challenges and problems of every depth, but none so great that I would turn my back on this business or even this life.

When there is an adventure in every mile and deep learning at every turn, then I am eager to spend a good amount of time solving the problems that accompany my life choices.

There is always a solution.

Even if that problem-solving time takes place on a bumpy, dusty drive in a hot truck.

Which circles me back to the dirty laundry, and the towels made filthy from trying to clean all that road dust out of my truck, layered thick from all the problem-solving drives I took.

I won’t bother you with a detailed laundry list of my problems – we all have our own to sort out, and our chosen patterns for solving them. Or running from them.

I don’t run from life’s bigger challenges, but I will run from ants.

It’s been seven hours, and I still haven’t gone into the laundry room to check on the ant situation.

There is no fear of them, I just don’t want to deal.

The good news is the ants don’t seem to be seeping out from under the door and invading other rooms in my house. I think I can safely choose not to handle this problem today.

Some problems are ant-sized, and small enough that they will solve themselves.

For those challenges that arrive with greater complications, and they are sure to, I’ll whistle for Roo, who is always stoked to jump in the truck.  We’ll head out for another bumpy drive, thinking over the bigger problems and figuring out a solution, getting dustier as we go.

~ Christy

If you enjoy my stories, feel free to buy me a coffee.

For professional partnerships, please explore my Writing Portfolio & Services, Retreat Consultation, or check out my Travel With a Purpose Retreats in Nicaragua.