Wach' ek'ojol?

It is noon and the temperature has only gotten to 70 so far. The sky is overcast and there’s a bit of mist falling now and again. Someone flipped the autumn switch and here we are. Yesterday at this time it felt like close to 100. It’s supposed to last through the weekend, which means the parish’s fall festival will just perfect weather-wise. Nice and cool. Maybe not so great for those of us who are scheduled for a session in the dunking booth, but it seems like a small price to pay. As long as we’re getting better weather, we could use some rain but maybe after the festival, please.

I spotted a large orb-weaver high up between a couple of trees, and it’s about time. Most of the smaller trees and bushes have gone straight from green to brown, but the maples are showing a bit of color as the daylight’s been decreasing. So all the ingredients are here: clouds, spiders, leaves, and cooler nights.

Proust: am taking my time with Finding Time Again. Charlus has become more sympathetic to me (and Albertine less so) as things head towards the end. The eruption of World War I seems all the more world-ending when seen from within the final moments of the fin de siècle, though maybe that’s because we know that it’s really only the beginning of much more horror. One wonders what the Verdurins would have made of the coming Vichy years. I expect they would have been just fine.

The house is quiet lately. Everyone’s in school and our one college kid still at home is about to get married, so he’ll be shipping out to their new home in just a couple of weeks. They’ll still be pretty local, so I imagine we’ll still see them quite a bit on weekends and such. During the day it’s just me, the two dogs, and the cat. The dogs spend most of the day snoozing or rough-housing. There’s no in-between. The cat, for her part, spends all of the day asleep in one of her appointed spots, one of which is in my office by the window.

The adjustment has been gradual - two of our girls moved out during the summer and three others have been on their own for awhile. By next month we’ll have three kids at home, and it hasn’t been that like for a very long time. Things are quieter, as I’ve mentioned. I’m cooking for fewer, which is a big change. We’re now very close to cooking most recipes at the normal serving instead of trying to scale them up, which usually works, but sometimes doesn’t. The housework is ramping down just a little, and the remaining kids will have more space of their own. I will certainly miss the constant level of commotion, but I think I can be OK with a bit less chaos in the household. The shorter lines in the laundry room are nice, in any event, as is getting the bonus room cleared of everyone’s temporary storage.

One of the constituent groups in our parish community is Chuj - a Mayan community indigenous to Guatemala, and not just Guatemala, two specific places in Guatemala. To be even more precise, our community hails from one of those places: San Sebastián Coatán in Huehuetanango, which lies on the border between Mexico and Guatemala.

Nearly all of the Chuj in our parish speak Spanish; they also speak Chuj. Once a month, they lead the prayers of the faithful during Mass in their own language, though there’s a bit of Spanish mixed in as well. I can sometimes pick up a word or two, but the language itself fascinated me so I’ve been trying to learn a bit of it: basic phrases and so forth. I enjoy the challenge, and the people (for their part) seem to appreciate it and also react with hilarity.

The Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala has published several resources on Chuj, but there are substantial regional differences between the language even though the two communities aren’t terribly far apart. For grammars and lexicons, I have to make sure that they cover San Sebastián usage and not San Mateo. There’s some overlap - the two communities say that they’re mutually intelligible, so maybe it doesn’t matter too much. In any case, I uploaded all the grammars, lexicons, and word-lists I could find into a Claude project and interrogate it regularly for the ins and outs of the language.

A in tik, to tzink’ayb’ej ti' chuj.

As soon as I have that memorized (“As for me, I am learning Chuj”) I’ll dare to run it past one of our folks to see. It should get big yuks; I’ll take them.