Not even that plush mattress could keep me in the sunken place past five, when there was mud to play with like Demi Moore in Ghost making a clay pot.
Greenhouse two is more straight ahead and flat than left and down as in one. First, you trample the bed behind you, because your attention is on the one in front and you didn’t notice the space isn’t even a boot step between beds.
Imagine how my ‘beak get brek’ when the immediately arising challenge was to undo my reluctance to get and be “dirty”! It had a feeling to it, mud between my fingers and under my fingernails, that caused my skin to walk. There were echoes of something…almost from before memory, perhaps withheld memories, of holding out my hands so they could be examined and hit on the parts that hurt most by a strap (given a human name) if they weren’t up to the teacher’s standard. Now my back would only seize up from all this bending over, all this ignoring the red mud’s invitation to kneel and be in intimate contact with it. Now the pipes in the sinks and by the sheep pen would call out to me to come wash it off.
Uninvited plants are pulled up, it doesn’t matter how hard they struggled to be there. This is easy when the earth is soft with morning dew. You aerate the soil, massaging it with your fingertips. Remind me to cut my fingernails. El Patron warned I could lose a fingernail if I hit a rock.
The camaraderie was enough of a distraction, so at once my hands and feet stopped warmed since my blood was no longer being reserved for feeding an overworking brain. Ed’s dad won’t stop harassing the hearing impaired worker, whistling every 20 seconds to get his attention. It’s all in Spanish, altered by socio-economic class, so regional jargon and accent, and I’m surprised how much I understand.
Weeding was followed by tomato picking! Added to my agricultural skills is the ability to identify a tomato that may look too green to you, but I know it will ripen. I can also pick them, leaving the stem behind (not as easy as that sounds). Ed’s Father taught me this while talking too much about pest control: the bright yellow, sticky pheromone paper and up-cycled plastic containers with a hole cut in them to trap an insect whose larvae bore into the tomatoes. (To be fair I asked lots of questions, knowing he could answer).
To Attract and Drown Insects
The exchange put Ed’s smile on his father’s face, but under a bushy moustache. Maybe he’d also expected communication would be a bigger challenge. El Patron inherited the farm and going to bed at seven pm to get up at four every day, doesn’t seem to have made him resentful.
When he was talking to the man on the left (above) who is considered important because he knows about how to mix what comes out of sheep with molasses, a beetle flew onto his hand.
Sheep shit mixed with molasses
Continuing his conversation, he let it crawl onto the index finger of the other hand, then guided it onto an avocado plant leaf.
Earlier, he’d admonished a worker saying that all animals have a role to play. “The snakes (!!) that visit should be left alone!” he said, “They’re venomous (!!!!) but they keep their distance.” (Unlike ones in the office where you might work).
Sure, snakes eat vermin. Is that the role in his mind? The sheep and chickens’ role must be to be kept in cages, hacked to pieces with the same machete and eaten.
Tourists never seem to be embarrassed taking photos of what’s common place to most people living in the world...like chickens. So why wait until no one’s around to point my phone at any number of plants? When the newness is gone, what will remain? The beauty of the place, if The Person is good, especially now with my interest in the “isness” of things.
The walk home
As one of three guys sitting in the front of a truck, relaxing my legs without thinking they might be thinking I’m flirting has been a challenge. On ZRs, even when you’ve squeezed in between two people it’s impossible not to sense the weight of their legs when they get tired or distracted from holding them together and let them settle against yours. It’s too intimate in its presupposition that they have your permission to press themselves against you with only a layer of cloth between. So I try not to do this to others by thinking too much about something that doesn’t matter and tensing my muscles for as long as they’re next to other peoples’ legs. Some people—my neighbours on the truck—sit like they’re airing themselves though…but they’re the types of men who shift around their penises while they’re talking about matters unrelated to genitalia.
We made stops at small stores to drop off vegetable orders. Then there was the wait in the line of minitrucks and a few refrigerated ones, like ours, for the market to open its gates at five. When you don’t have an expectation! You can’t tell from outside that the market is football stadium size! Farmers’ stalls everywhere. A festival of fruits and veggies!
Epileptic Egg
Ed bought eggs we (me and the teenaged Nicaraguan illegal!) transferred into crates that hold a dozen for resale. One egg looked like it came out the chicken as it had a fit—the shell ripples.
In my pre-farm euphoria, I bought a direct bus ticket to and from the final stops. The farm is about midway between meaning a loss of almost 10 dollars. My farm experience has lifted me above mundane cares, however, above speaking to myself harshly for being “careless”! What it would be to go from one high to the next!
What a day! I’m off to practice eating even the core of this apple (like Ed does) although the seeds contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide.
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