Introducing: Things that Used to be Normal and Now are Not

A few months ago when I was Spring Cleaning I discovered this:


A hole about the size of a dime in one of my screens. At first, I was quite consumed by this hole and had visions of all sorts of Outside Things making their merry way inside. And since another one of my screens was not quite in properly, there was at least two entry point for these Outside Things. I remember contemplating calling my neighbors down to help me pop the one screen back in and trying to find some duct tape to temporarily fix the hole. I was quite obsessed about it for a few of days.

And then, it dawned on me: I had lived five years of my life without screens in the Dominican Republic and didn’t think twice about it.

Granted, Outside Things in the DR didn’t include squirrels; but it did include lizards, flying ants, regular ants, cockroaches, rats, mosquitoes and little boys who took advantage of the wide slats of the window and managed to steal the car keys from my kitchen table which was a good five feet from the window. Having screens wouldn’t have stopped some of the Outside Things from getting in anyway, and since hardly anyone had screens it actually didn’t cross my mind to get them.

I often think of myself as having to figure out “how to live like an adult” twice in my life. Phase One happened in another country (I moved to the DR three weeks after graduating from college) and the second time is still underway (Phase Two started about four years ago upon moving back from living in the DR for five years). At first some of the differences were glaringly obvious, but now I don’t think too much about the differences. That is, until something like a dime sized hole in a screen causes me to stop and think about what my life was like in Phase One of becoming an adult.

Thus I have decided to start a mini-series of sorts: Things that Used to be Normal and Now are Not.

Some caveats about said series:

1. This is not an attempt to claim that one way is better than the other or even more “normal” than the other. For at some point in both Phases I have had things shift from “normal” to “abnormal” and vice versa (i.e. my first few weeks in the DR I probably did get the heebies that there weren’t any screens on the windows).
2. This is also not an attempt to pull the “back when I was a missionary we had to walk five miles for water—uphill both ways in the snow” (this obviously is not true because I lived in the Caribbean, and (most days) had running water).

Things that Used to be Normal and Now are Not is more for my own benefit as I have seen that thinking through the differences between my Phases of Adulthood explain a bit why I am the way I am about certain things. Moreover, thinking through these differences gives you one big fat perspective check. So, here’s to a new series…and I welcome anyone who has had a similar experience to share their own Thing that Used to be Normal but Now is Not.