Hard cheese, soft toilet paper

Two decades ago, Jessica, my nearest Peace Corps neighbor, made a significant discovery in the city of Quevedo: semi-hard cheese. At the time, Quevedo was over two hours away via bus and the closest place to access dial-up internet. That day, I received a special delivery via the bus driver as he passed through La Josefina: a chunk of cheese wrapped in an ecstatic hand-written note, "Try this! It is amazing!!! -JLH"

Ecuadorians love cheese, but almost all of the cheese produced and consumed here is queso fresco, a mild, soft fresh cheese, often salted, made from local cow's milk. It is eaten fresh and served in many typical dishes including empanadas and bolón. Queso fresco is tasty, but it does not really melt and bears little resemblance to the cheddar, gouda, and Havarti of our homeland. Even today, mozzarella is the only other readily available cheese in Ecuador, except in specialty stores and supermarkets in large cities.

I sampled the semi-hard cheese from Quevedo and was instantly delighted. While we both tolerated the local queso fresco well enough, we missed cheeses from home. Cheese, in fact, was a frequent topic of Peace Corps conversation and longing. From that day on, whenever Jessica made the trek to Quevedo to check her email, she would buy a chunk of cheese, cut it in half and send my portion along on the bus. We felt like we had discovered buried treasure.

It was not until about a year later, when my ex-boyfriend came from the US with a chunk of cheddar cheese in tow that our love affair with the Quevedo cheese abruptly ended. One bite of the Safeway brand-nothing-special-Lucerne-medium-cheddar, and our bubble of delight was permanently popped. The cheese we had been loving tasted nothing like this. In comparison, it was bitter, flavorless, and strangely textured. We were so sad. 

Through the years, I have thought often about how happy the Quevedo cheese made us before our bubble collapsed, how if we had never tasted that Safeway cheddar, we could have lived on in contented bliss indefinitely. 

***

This week, my Peace Corps friend, Kristen, arrived from the US bearing gifts, including Skippy peanut butter, dark chocolate, and new socks for the kids. But she also brought a delightfully amusing treat: two rolls of toilet paper. Only someone who has lived in South America for any period of time would have thought to bring such an odd and wonderful present. And in true Kristen fashion, she said nothing of it; she simply left the rolls in the bathrooms for each of us to discover on our own. Within an hour, each of my children was exclaiming in joy, "Have you tried this toilet paper?! It's so soft." One pronounced, "It is like cotton!"

Kristen grinned. "I knew you would appreciate it," she said. 

For the next several days at our Mompiche beach house, the super soft toilet paper was a frequent topic of conversation. For a bidet-loving family, you might be surprised at the number of times the topic was reprised!

A couple of days later, upon returning home to La Josefina, Dillon stumbled out of bed, verging on hypnopompic, "Mom, was that just normal toilet paper that Kristen brought? Or was it something special? Is that what we always use in the States?"

***

Isn't it amazing how flexible humans are?! How fleeting our memories?! How open our minds?! How we can adjust, adapt, and appreciate novel entities as if they had been forever ours, particularly if they are all we have. But is it not also telling how delightful that which we have always known can be? How comforting the feeling of "home" really is?