Five years ago, after a lifetime of living cramped in apartments, waking up to the sound of trucks, buses, and traffic, we moved into our dream home in rural Virginia (about two hours from Washington, DC). It was a beautiful house on a hill with an acre of garden and another acre of forest, surrounded by greenery, on a dead-end street that was just across the street from a creek full of frogs and mushrooms, where my kids spent hours—and I repeat, hours—playing and getting muddy. A huge weeping willow near a stone wall had low-hanging branches that were perfect for the kids to climb—and they climbed so high that they gave me mini-heart attacks. The lawn was vast, and with the help of a gardener, my mother and I carved out a small, flat patch of land and planted a small vegetable garden, where we planted arugula, peppers, chili peppers, melons, assorted herbs, raspberries, and blueberries.
There was not even any street lighting on our street, and I had the best nights of my life there: dark, moonless nights in absolute stillness. We would wake up in the morning to see deer eating – or “mowing” – the grass; squirrels jumping from branch to branch; birds of so many colors singing, nesting in the trees, in the wreath on the front door, in the bushes surrounding the large porch. In the early days, my daughter would never step on the grass barefoot: it was a strange sensation for a child who had been, until then, a “building kid”: she had only known built environments. After four days, Sophia was running around the property without shoes or slippers and often without clothes, with infinite and enviable freedom, as if she had always lived there. Digging in the earth looking for worms, stepping on sharp rocks barefoot, rolling downhill in the tall grass, climbing trees, understanding the meaning of chickens’ songs and knowing how to discern the song of each bird became my children’s specialties. “Someone laid an egg!”, “a branch fell from the Poplar tree”, “I managed to catch a lizard!” were phrases that showed the intimacy that the two had with nature and that gave me great pleasure.
The garden, which ideally would be organic – of course – needed a lot of natural fertilizer and a lot of love, water and attention, and suddenly it was full of food. Of the arugula, which was still small, only the stems remained and, after a serious inspection, the children noticed small snails at the base of the plants. In one night, the snails had eaten everything! My husband, very pragmatic, transformed the organic garden into a functional garden (read: with pesticides but also productive). A beautiful caterpillar appeared on the parsley, colored green, blue and yellow, but it also left the parsley all holed and yellow. Our approach to this pest was more natural: my son, who was a year and a half old at the time, thought the caterpillars were so amazing that he removed them, one by one, with his little hands, with great joy. The blueberries, melons, raspberries, peppers and chili peppers were eaten by the deer for breakfast and, in about two weeks, all that was left were the herbs.
It was the beginning of summer and, on the third day after we moved, coincidentally, it was the day the cicadas came out. If you’ve never heard of this phenomenon (an invasion of cicadas that “hibernate” for seven years and then suddenly emerge to mate and bury themselves again), you’re in luck. We couldn’t open the windows or even go out onto the balcony. There were so many cicadas, so many, that they would land on our heads (and noses, shoulders…), we had to cover our mouths with our hands to talk so they wouldn’t come in…
Now, please understand that we are extremely adventurous to the point that I sometimes wonder if we are crazy. The truth is that up until then we were still finding everything very fun and our energy was at a thousand! As long as everything was under control inside the house, what was going on outside would not affect us. For example: my mother was visiting us and decided to leave the leftovers in the tool shed “for the hungry animals” (in my mother’s defense, she has a very good heart), but it was a terrible idea. An adult bear had become a “customer” of this new restaurant and decided to visit us after mom left, probably wanting to know where the food was.
As autumn arrived, the vegetable garden/deer bar was already drying out, the nights were getting colder and the many trees around our house were changing color, a sight to behold. It was on a warmer day in October that the ladybugs arrived in their thousands and stuck to the outside wall of the living room. It was a swarm of ladybugs of various colors that somehow found their way into the house: the high ceiling of the living room was like a starry sky forming several constellations. The windows had a polka-dot effect and the landscape outside the house could no longer be seen. Surely the ladybugs would leave sooner or later, right? The hundreds of ladybugs would only leave the house in April of the following year, with the arrival of spring, and this would happen every year, without exception.
During the four years we lived in that house, we had to deal with many other pests: mice galore because we were so close to the forest, carpenter bees that destroyed the porch, stink bugs, blue beetles, and more. Each season presented different challenges, and after a while we could already predict what was coming: ladybugs would arrive around October 15th, November was the time to buy mousetraps, and in April, stink bugs would arrive. As exhausting as this battle against invasive fauna was (combined with the natural tribulations of adult life), we had good years in that house, and all the fighting against nature was nothing compared to the xenophobic mentality that surrounded us.
My neighbors were certainly kind and caring people who supported us and gave us strength in difficult times, but there came a time when our foreign name on the mailbox at the entrance to the property began to scare us. The city where we lived, a liberal dot on a conservative map (despite the state of Virginia being Democratic), became the symbol of racist and xenophobic violence in 2017. After the election of the current president, it was increasingly common to hear strangers say the phrase most beloved by conservative Americans: “go back to your country”. This was whispered to me quite often while I was shopping with my children, as a result of speaking to them in Portuguese. At school functions, when I wore a sticker with my name, other parents were curious to know “why I had chosen Caroline as my American name”. It is difficult to explain the obvious to those who do not want to understand, but I always told myself that my name was common in several other countries, including French-speaking ones. “Caroline is not an exclusively American name”, I always said. If I was in a good mood, I would say that my real name was Guadalupe (Michael chose the name Jesus, pronounced with the Spanish J, chic him).
At the end of four years, having embarked on the dream but waking up scared, we had the opportunity to move to a state jokingly called the “Socialist Republic of Vermont,” where I see ladybugs in the garden every now and then and mice make occasional expeditions on the kitchen floor (the children do not deny anyone food) but where no one has ever questioned my name. Life here is peaceful and the people are genuinely good. My children’s school teaches, in addition to math and social studies, kindness and love for others. It’s the little things that make life good.