local knowledge

A couple of weeks ago, snorkeling in Agana bay, Nick and I got scraped up pretty thoroughly on the sharp coral. Yesterday I noticed that a scrape on my knee hasn't actually healed - it's a really superficial scrape, and it should have disappeared by now, but it's gone all welty and red. It doesn't hurt, but it itches a bit like a mosquito bite. 

Should I worry? I don't think it could be dangerous, since it doesn't seem to be an infection - but it sure looks icky... 

I'll bet, though, that this is just like a poison ivy or poison oak sting you'd get back home, and I don't know about it because I didn't grow up here. Maybe a person from Guam who had never been in a temperate climate would take a vacation in California, walk through a patch of poison oak without knowing it, develop a rash, and get really worried and rush to the doctor thinking he was going to die.  

I believe we have a fundamental comprehension of our native climate, that comes from playing outside and walking in the woods - or splashing in the tidepools, or stalking through the tall grass - when we're kids. We absorb so much information by experiencing the environment directly - the kind of information that you can't get from reading a tourist guide book, and you're too busy to get as an adult, because you can't devote hours and hours of every day to catching bugs and climbing trees and picking flowers... 

Oh well. Here is a flower from Guam, a little ground-creeping flower whose name I haven't learned.

The tree may grow best in the land of its sires, but we can all bloom where we're planted!