Hammocks and House Warmers

Being a third year intern, I feel like I have a few different perspectives about some of the things that we experience as an intern group. One of those perspectives is how awesome it is to live at the ranch. In previous summers, we have lived in an apartment in the center of San Marcos, and while that was convenient and very accommodating, it is nothing compared to the serenity and beauty of living on the ranch. I love our house here. It is an old A-frame house with a tin roof. Storms are a symphony out here. They start with the rumble of thunder from out towards the right of our front porch. All the tall grasses in the fields around our house start to rustle and whisper in the wind and the trees in the wooded area behind our houses sway and swoosh. Then the drops of rain fall at random on our roof. As the storm draws in closer the whole roof sounds as if it my crumble with the next drop of rain. It is so lound! Remember in elementary school music class when you got to hold the rain maker and you heard the trickle of beans fall through the wooden posts of the stick? Well, whoever invented that was right on. Every time we get rain out here, I hear an amplified version of that and it just makes me smile. If the wind isn’t too strong you can curl up in one of our brightly colored hammocks that line the edges of our house. They hang between the big wooden posts that hold up the overhang over our porch and they are the perfect spot to listen to the rain come in and out. They are definitely my favorite part of the house, and im obviously not alone in those sentiments because it seems that as soon as we all get home from our day of work, every single one is occupied with someone reading, or journaling, studying (yes some of us are still taking classes and working on school work while here!), or catching a siesta. It’s a great place to get away at the end of the day. Of course don’t think we’ve raised support to come live in a paradise. There are still plenty of aspects to living out here that I would be just fine doing without. For example, the other night we came home to a beautiful housewarming welcome gift. Two HUGE tarantulas at our back door. That’s right, just like you are imagining, a big brown/black fury small rodent creeping around ready to pounce on your foot. Another uninvited habitant of the house would be the scorpion I found on my towel, or his brother that Shanna and I found on her bed. It seems that the scorpions particularly like our room. There was also a boa constrictor found living under our couch. Things like this are definatley not my favorite things to think about, especially when I get up in the middle of the night, or in the pitch black at our 5:30 wake up call during the week. But they are all a part of the life out here and I am really enjoying it.

- rebekah