(a companion post to “The Night Is Dark and Full of Terrors: Bedbugs in Puerto Natales”) (and, I deeply hope, the last of the series)

I’m sitting at the kitchen counter, jamming to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” Sara’s stirring a simmering risotto, and we’re discussing the latest barrage of passive-aggressive texts from her ex; this Sunday night is just like the previous ten evenings I’ve spent in Punta del Este, except this time, anti-lice treatment is burning into my scalp.

Surprise! Another infest infestation! I thought I was in South America courting Spanish and self-reflection; turns out the continent is more interested in throwing its collection of bugs my way. What’s next? Mosquitos in Cuzco? Biting fleas in Quito?

I’ve gotten good at laughing about situations like this one; I’m continuing to gain conviction in my new number-one guiding principle of “you can’t always control what happens to you, you can always control how you react to it.” So I’m sitting here, with Sara, smiling and disinfecting the nit comb and strategizing possible opening lines to send to her new kind-of boo, after an afternoon of us making the best of a rather not-fun situation.

You’ll hear more about Sara and Amelie later, in “Uruguay: A Love Letter” (sneak peek: Uruguay is my favorite country I’ve been to so far, I love its politics and people and paisajes [landscapes], and I’m spending more time here than I planned). The short version: Sara is a lovely, newly separated 40-year-old yoga teacher / Englishwoman-turned-Uruguayan / general badass and the mother of 2-and-a-half-year-old, perfectly bilingual, insanely well-coiffed Amelie, my new best friend and daily companion (and, by the terms of our Workaway agreement, my charge—in exchange for helping Sara with childcare [and dog-care and garden-care and house-care], I get meals and my own cabin on the grounds of their lovely, mod, Punta del Este home two blocks from the beach).

The dream team, Sara and Amelie, watching for sea lions at el puerto

Our street!

My cabaña

The most important thing to know about Amelie for this missive is that she goes to a nursery for a few hours each morning.  Said nursery is full of other children, few of whom are as expressive or outgoing as she is but all of whom are equally likely to go head-to-head with each other in various nursery games.

And of course, by the nature of my job here, I spent lots of time head-to-head with Amelie, too: playing “the monster has locked you in the dungeon and you must escape” and its cousin, the classic tickle monster; flipping her upside-down-right-side-up to elicit streams of perfect giggles; holding her close as we lap the backyard with the garden hose; cradling her sleeping form out of her stroller and onto her bed for siesta. If Amelie has lice, I have lice, no questions about it.

Regular Kath-and-Ame antics (in close proximity)

So when Amelie came home from nursery last week scratching her bouncy curls and Sara mentioned that she was worried about lice, which Amelie had picked up at school the previous year, I refused to confront the possibility, assuming she just had a spot of dandruff. We both gave Amelie a once-over and didn’t see anything, but the scratching didn’t go away and neither did Sara’s paranoia, so today, after Amelie spent the weekend with her dad, Sara broke out the nit comb while Amelie was otherwise occupied, playing with her friend Max.

Amelie, who was naked (she loves being desnuda and usually strips off her school uniform the moment she walks in the door) and thus difficult to keep hold of, started to squirm (if nudity is her favorite thing, hair-brushing is her least). I was drafted to sit in front of Sara, creating a human cage for Amelie, and distract her with her Peppa Pig sticker book; I did so and thus had a front-row seat as Sara combed through Amelie’s hair and pulled out nit after nit and louse after louse (nit being the egg, louse being the fully-grown parasitic insect; if you have more than one louse you have lice; I now know so much more than I’d like to know on the subject).

Amelie’s friend Max, a redheaded American boy, had come over to play that morning, and because one of Uruguay’s tree-lashing, house-shaking, road-flooding thrice-a-year rainstorms began shortly after his arrival, he and his mother Molly were stuck at our house until the rain let up. (Molly, a tall Asian-American woman with stick-straight bangs and a tendency towards control-freak, had tried to leave earlier to go home to get hydrogen peroxide—she’d arrived at Sara’s house, beelined to the not-sparkling kitchen sink, done all of the dishes and wiped down the counters, and then begged Sara to let her do her floors—but was unable to make it out of the neighborhood on the waterlogged roads.)

Molly, seeing the lice pulled out of Amelie’s hair, began to dissolve. She grabbed Max and began sifting through his hair, groaning audibly. She saw a louse, whimpered, and then immediately left Sara’s house, flooded roads be damned, abandoning a trail of possessions (her sunglasses, Max’s sweatpants, a change of clothes in a fleece bag, a stackable wooden toy, two oranges, a tray of cornbread) in her hasty exodus.

Molly kept us updated with a series of voice messages throughout the afternoon: she’d stripped all the linen in their house; she’d soaked Max’s head in anti-lice treatment; she’d called her husband, at a training program in Scotland for oil rig operators, and informed him of the grave situation.

Molly’s response to the situation was outsized in a way that reminded me that some people aren’t emotionally or logically equipped to be parents. Sara and I responded slightly less hysterically.

I was surprised, actually, at how nonplussed I was. Perhaps I didn’t really think that it was going to affect me personally (in fact, I didn’t really believe that a new infestation was upon me until this evening, when Sara ran the nit comb through my own hair and picked out two juicy lice and half a dozen eggs—but we’ll get there), like the bedbugs did. But I think it has less to do with the scope of impact and more to do with the team I’m combating it with.

In Puerto Natales, I was working for a misogynistic despot doing menial labor with little to no payout; in Punta del Este, I’m working for a woman I deeply respect whose generosity and warmth has made me feel like a part of the family. Sure, combing each other for nits is less fun than our previous activities of taking small-town nightlife by storm or leading an expedition to a lush island paradise, but good attitudes and a commitment to finding the humor in it all make even rather disgusting activities palatable.

It’s yet another confirmation of a long-held personal truth: it’s all about the people. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, whether for recreation or chores or a professional occupation; it matters who I’m doing it with. I have less and less patience for people who don’t enrich my life, and more and more appreciation for those who do. Sara and Amelie are in the second category.

Sara and I calmly dressed Amelie, tied back our hair and hers, and got into the car to head to the pharmacy to stock up on lice treatment. As we pulled into the Tienda Inglesa parking lot, Sara made a joke about the afternoon of actual nit-picking that lay ahead that made me wheeze with laughter and prompted Amelie to ask, in her posh and perfect British accent, “What are you laughing about?”, which then prompted me to explain, in the smallest words I could string together, the difference between figurative and literal meanings and the rudimentary basics of punmaking.

Amelie, with the gravity that only a toddler possess, nodded her head and accepted my explanation.  Sara and I climbed out of the car, released Amelie from her booster seat, and reviewed each other’s outfits.

I looked like an actual garbage can. I was wearing an old, grey, oversized work t-shirt, a pair of black running shorts, purple calf-high wool socks, hiking boots (my only waterproof shoes), and my trusty, peeling turquoise raincoat that left flakes of white lining all over my neck and shoulders, which probably looked like dandruff to the uninitiated (little did they know what was actually lurking on my scalp). Sara looked much better in a ripped denim skirt, striped pink sweater, and slip-on-sneakers, but was still underdressed for the mall on a rainy Sunday, which every single mobile person in the city limits of Punta del Este had descended upon.

We entered the grocery store and quickly made our rounds, replenishing enough life-giving staples to get us through the day: milk, butter, rice, apples, baby wipes, lemon cake, wine. Sara threw in some new markers and colored pencils for Amelie, which made the darling girl smile so earnestly, baby teeth gleaming, that my already fine mood was further heightened.  I thought about buying some peanut butter, but it was 186 pesos ($6) and I know I’ll get some at the end of the month when my visitors come (whoo!).

We raced across to the pharmacy. Sara bought lice treatment and Amelie and I tried on at least four perfumes each; then, smelling like the gardens at Versailles had mated with a spice cabinet, we waltzed out and entered the actual mall with our grocery-store shopping cart, a big no-no but something that our collectiveness blondness (and our therefore assumed ignorance) allowed.

On our way out of the pharmacy, we ran into Serena and her partner Jesus, friends of Sara’s who max out on my crunchiness scale.  She’s a yoga teacher, he’s a farmer, they live in the middle of nowhere (to enter their homestead you have to undo a padlock slung around a wood-and-iron gate, drive two kilometers down an unpaved road, pass two pastures of cows, and park in front of their hand-built adobe-constructed circular yoga / music / meditation hut, which features wine-bottle windows and a straw roof and a beautiful hexagonal wood floor; their home is then another few yards through a meadow, dotted with the solar panels that power the house), their son Kai has a long, androgynous haircut and is never without a puka-shell necklace, and their real names aren’t Serena and Jesus—they’re something boring and bourgeois like Camilla and Adrian; they traded in the names when they committed to an all-natural, salt-of-the-earth lifestyle (but kept the family money, because someone’s gotta pay for that yoga hut). Of course, Serena looked perfect in a mustard-colored blouse and brightly patterned head scarf and leggings and chunky clogs; remember, Sara and I resembled garbage cans. Kai was being wheeled around in a Lightening McQueen replica; Amelie was perched in a stolen grocery store cart that we were still using despite being yelled at by security guards (when I took it onto the escalator, despite all posted signs warning against that very activity) to return it. I thought we couldn’t have looked more of a hot mess until I compared us to them.

They continued on, and Sara looked at me. “Fuck it”—I can’t tell whether Amelie actually doesn’t hear us when we swear or if she is intelligent enough to know not to repeat bad words in adult company; I haven’t heard her voice one yet—“let’s go to the arcade.”

We wheeled our way to the end of the mall, ducked into the darkness of the arcade, and hid our cart behind a pinball machine. Neither of us had pesos on us, which were all the rides accepted, so we weren’t able to actually activate the merry-go-round or the cowboy or the little red car or any of the other animatronic creatures; even if we had, we wouldn’t have paid for them on principle, as the prices were ridiculous. (I love everything about Uruguay except its insanely inflated cost of living—not even in the US does a single 60-second ride on a mall merry-go-round cost $2.) Amelie wasn’t fooled by us jostling the horses within the limited range of motion possible without paying; she may only be two, but she sees through bullshit like the most practiced of cynics.

I found a dusty ticket on the floor and dragged Amelie to the prize counter to see what we could trade it in for. The answer was, of course, nothing—the cheapest prize was a neon hair tie that went for 5 tickets—but my stuttering Spanish and Amelie’s Gerber-baby-besting, pageant-perfect cuteness garnered us the attendant’s affection, and she passed us a cherry lollipop—a 12 ticket item!—with a conspiratorial wink.

Could you find it in your heart to NOT give this girl a free lollipop? No, right?

We strutted out of that arcade. We were just missing the wind machines, otherwise we could’ve been a Charlie’s Angels reboot. I returned our errant shopping cart and Sara drove us home, where we fed Amelie and taught her the basics of potty-related humor, which had me crying with laughter, because I am a highly mature adult who is powerless in the face of a giggling toddler proclaiming “You are a fart, you are a burp—and I’m not a burp or a fart, I’m a poo-poo!”

After the fun dinner came the less-fun bath and lice treatment application and literal nitpicking, first for Amelie and then for Sara and me. On the advice of my dear Michael, I then slathered my hair in olive oil, tied it up, and went to bed, where I had one of my worst sleeps in Uruguay (ranks below the time a mosquito got inside my mosquito netting and bit me three times on the face before I could get it, but just barely) but still woke up giggling about the ordeal.

NIT PICKIN GANG 😀 😀 😀

I wouldn’t wish lice on anyone (that’s not true—I’d wish them on the long list of people I don’t like, but let’s pretend I’m a better person than that). But having them has been another dose of practicing being calm and accepting what life throws at me, and I’m better for it.

Author’s postscript: I’m now lice-free (for the time being, at least—I’ll get another treatment in 5 days, to make sure we wipe out any missed nits, and Sara will comb my head daily until then for peace of mind; today and yesterday turned up nary a nit nor a louse and I slept like a baby last night as a result, phantom itch begone). I’m also almost entirely respiratory-virus free (did I not mention I had a really bad cold for the three days leading up to the lice outbreak? It’s like the nits could sense my weakness). I had a beautiful day with Amelie and Sara yesterday, I went on a ridiculously wonderful date last night, I took an incredible yoga class this morning, I saw a perfect sunset this afternoon, I am happy and alive and thriving and laughing and grateful. And I know I just used a lot of trite, cliche words but I don’t know how else to describe how happy this place makes me—even if it also occasionally gives me parasitic infestations.

Until next time, friends. xo