Watering the garden, tromping through dust, hauling buckets of water, moving stones, turning compost, cutting down trees (rapidly regenerating ones, of course) to make vegetable beds and hauling the wood halfway across creation, hiking down the rugged path to town – dirt and mud of all forms are a fundamental part of life here, so why not carry them with you?
‘Here.’ Where is ‘here’? Slightly more broadly speaking, ‘here’ is the island of Ometepe, a figure-eight-shaped land mass formed by two volcanoes rising up out of the beautiful blue Lake Cocibolca. All the island’s inhabitants live, more or less, on the side of one volcano or the other. We’re on the Volcan Maderas side, the luscious cloud-forest-covered-crate
Narrowing down a little, the ‘we’ that I am specifically referring to are the inhabitants of Finca Bona Fide, a permaculture farm doing a combination of research and projects focused on improving food security for people in our own little community of Balgue, just down the hill from us on the lake shore, and the world ‘round.
I would love to tell you about those projects, and hopefully I will in the weeks and months to come, but I prefer to take today to introduce you to a smidgen of my life here. Start with me and work outward from there – is that egocentric or what?
My favorite mornings begin with the rising sun falling on my sleeping bag, a stretch and a roll off the spongy pool mat that cushions the wooden floor of the treehouse below me, and, if I’ve woken up early enough, a few stretches and peaceful moments looking out over the lake and the volcano before descending to life below.
I prefer to sleep in the treehouse, not only for the delight of falling asleep under moonglow on tree branches or black sky strewn with stars, but also for the cool winds that pass freely over me all through the night. Last night I tried sleeping in my new ‘official’ abode, a round structure with a cement floor, a low stone wall, open sides, and a thatch roof. Since I don’t have a bed yet, and therefore can’t rig up a mosquito net, I slept in my tent. As I tried to fall asleep, I listened to the wind rushing in the trees around me yet felt not even the slightest breath of it on my humidly sticky skin.
This humidly sticky skin is becoming par for the course now; from mid-morning until late afternoon, the sun beats furiously down and leaves us without a doubt that this is the most intensely hot time of the year.
Somehow I don’t notice the heat so much in the mornings, even when I’m swinging a pick and filling buckets of rich dirt from swales to replenish the tired soil in the garden beds or gathering bag-fulls of dry manure or rice straw in the fields around the farm. I was so oblivious to it the other day, chopping down bananas and plantains, mulching young fruit trees with their moist stalks, and hauling the fruit up to the kitchen, that I turned the exposed part of my back a nice shade of raspberry.
These are my mornings: some days intense, some days more mellow, like today, wandering in the bush looking for seeds pods of a certain wild plant that is known to be a nitrogen-fixer and that we want to plant in various places to improve soil, and collecting and storing cilantro, okra, mustard, and bean seeds from the drying-out plants in the garden.
Nevis, my Nicaraguan co-worker in the garden, and I made a list this morning of the things that we will be doing in the next six weeks before the rains begin. Most of it I’ve already mentioned – collecting good soil for the garden, fixing the raised beds, collecting manure and mulch, making and storing compost, collecting seeds of various nitrogen-fixing plants that we’ll put in compromised soil and let grow more or less wild until fall – as well as preparing the fields for plantings of corn, beans, rice, and rainy season vegetables (I can’t wait for our own cucumbers, cantaloupe, watermelon, squash, zucchini…), making nurseries of grasses that we’ll plant along contour lines to hold the soil in the fields in place, and doing all this while planning one of our biggest events of the year, the seed exchange, or Intercambio de Semillas.
Of course all these things can’t be finished during our five hours of morning work, and so, hiding in the deepest shade we can find, and trying to put off anything that involves moving the body until as late as possible, we let our brain-storming – and for me, my community-related involvement – activities spill over into the afternoons. Today Nevis and I began planning a workshop on organic agriculture that we’ll put on at the community center in May in the hopes of spreading the good word and encouraging people to think about the quantities of chemicals they’re dumping onto their fields, and, indirectly, into the beautiful blue lake that provides the fish that we eat every day and refreshing swims in the afternoon. We’re also hoping to attract people who might be interested in working in the fields with us this summer, who might come not only with the desire to earn a few extra pesos but with at least the spark of an interest in what kind of craziness happens at this farm up the hill and what they might be able to learn from that. (More notes on the craziness, as embodied in words like ‘schizlobium’, later).
Mornings, afternoons, now evenings. Actually, I brushed over a huge part of my afternoons, and occasionally my evenings, in the three words, ‘community-related involvement’. But I’ll save that for another page, I think.
It’s quite possible to sum up the best part of the evenings here in one word, though – sunset. Without fail, it’s a photograph that’s already been taken but that one feels almost compelled to take again and again: read from left to right like a book in Arabic, it begins with deep blue lake and light blue sky split by a perfectly straight horizontal line, moves over to the smoky gray volcanic triangle of Concepcion in the shadows, and concludes with pink and purple wafts of cloud drifting above a perfectly round ball of orange fire. Inhale long and low, exhale long and slow; the sun sinks behind a screen of palms and spiky ceba trees, and it’s time to rinse the dirt off my filthy feet and call it a day.
