Texas Independence Day smoke

Texas celebrated its 174th birthday this year. In honor of this auspicious occasion, I hosted a Texas Independence Day party last Friday. I planned a decent Tex-Mex menu: guacamole and chips, sweet tea, refried beans, sour cream enchiladas, mint brownies, peach cobbler, and Blue Bell ice cream. I wondered how I would cook the food without an oven, but on Tuesday, my landlord fulfilled his months-long promise to replace our stove and oven set.

On Friday morning, everything was going according to plan. A Gonzalez flag hung on one wall. The brownies were cooling on the stove. The enchiladas were ready to bake. The peaches were stewed with cinnamon and nutmeg. I got up early to cook the beans, one of my few remaining tasks.

I thought I turned the beans off before I went to work. Honest. Perhaps I turned them on high instead; the stove was new, after all. In any case, the beans burned, and my friends’ first smell of Texas Independence Day was the smoke billowing down three flights of stairs to the street below. We opened windows, turned on fans, and bought canned beans at the corner store. My friends were gracious and didn’t complain. When we went to a movie later that night, though, we smelled like chain smokers.

Saturday was spent fighting a losing battle with the smoke. The maid came and scrubbed for three hours. The laundry lady picked up almost every piece of clothing my roommate and I own. We opened every window wide and let in the beautiful Puebla air. The house smelled of bleach and sunshine. And smoke.

For the next three days, my roommate and I tried everything possible. We cooked food. We boiled juice. We tried keeping bedroom doors open. We tried keeping them closed. The smell improved, but not much. Finding clothes for work was a challenge, since our clothes were still at the laundry. I dug into the depths of my closet to find the clothes least affected by the disaster. Still, I had to keep my classroom windows open to keep my nose from wrinkling whenever I got around myself (pretty often).

I lived for Tuesday afternoon, when the laundry lady would return bags of sweet-smelling clothes to my apartment. When I called her after work, though, she said it wouldn’t be done until Wednesday. I was leaving Wednesday morning for my friend's wedding, though. New laundry plan. I went over to her shop and dug through my bags of smoky clothes until I found enough for my trip.


Now I’m on the plane to Phoenix. My suitcase is loaded with smoke-saturated laundry, and whenever I open my purse, a puff of smoky air blows into my face. I really hope this is over soon; I can’t take much more smoke.