Bounty

of couch potatoes, lemons, and Easter eggs

Yesterday Alberto knocked on the door with a bag of lemons, a hoe, and a battle cry: Let’s plant potatoes! A few days ago he came over with a roto-tiller thingy and tilled the soil for a second time in two months, creating three long furrows. Why is he doing that when two strong younger men are available, I asked the h. He just arrived and started it up, the h explained, running into the house to change into his Carhartts.

Today we planted five quilos of potatoes, and I raced with my hoe to do at least as much work as Alberto. We paused in our work when we met in the middle of a row. I took off my hat and wiped sweat from my brow. Twenty-six quilos of potatoes planted today, Alberto told me. My arms, my back, my legs - this weekend I will do nothing, just sit on the sofa!

Oh, voce sera uma sofa de batata, I said, and he laughed, indicating a couch potato is a thing in every culture.

After all the potatoes were planted Alberto pointed out a good place to plant sunflowers, then admonished Herb to get the greenhouse constructed this weekend. We’re going as fast as we can, Herb whispered. The land has been leveled, plastic sheeting laid down, and Tiago spent the last part of the day making trip after trip up the cottage staircase hauling double buckets of stones that will comprise the floor of the greenhouse.

I weeded the flower bed where the naked ladies will soon flaunt pink Easter hats, then the raised beds, even though my arms are still tired from weeding the fruit orchard and the built-in beds that line the sidewalk behind it. Later this weekend I will cut the weeds down at the chicken coop, then finish weeding the quinta garden, where the almond tree stands in the center of weeds that look tall and menacing but in fact pull up by the root with just a tug. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. I’m already mad about next week’s rain which will ensure that the weeds grow back faster than I can pull them.

The h harvested a trash bag full of spinach. We found a half dozen eggs, most just sitting out in the open they way you ‘hide’ Easter eggs for little tykes. Indeed, finding the eggs does feel a lot like an Easter egg hunt.

It’s funny how clear some memories are - I remember my first ever Easter egg hunt put on my my parish, St. Augustine of Canterbury. My school grounds featured a large complex of four baseball fields. On Easter Sunday that field was sown with brightly colored Easter Eggs dyed beautiful colors. Some had a nickel, dime or quarter taped to them; some were plastic and contained pastel jelly beans or the highly coveted malted milk balls with the robin’s egg blue candy shell. All the kids were lined up in a long row, then Father Kuhl in his long black robes that smelled of cigar smoke would call Ready, set, go! setting off a free for all of kids running around grabbing up as many eggs as they could put in their basket. I was five, wearing an easter dress with a stiff frilly skirt and my patent leather shoes, which were slippery and made me stumble and fall, spilling all my eggs onto the ground. A nice older boy, maybe twelve (I still remember that his name was Kevin) stopped and refilled my basket, quickly filling it much more full than it had been before my fall. I ran back to my dad to show him, the heavy basket banging against my shins, and dad took a dollar out of his wallet and walked over to have a word with Kevin’s dad, who waved his son over. Dad thanked him for helping me and they shook hands, and the boy gasped audibly at getting a whole dollar.

The calla lilies that I planted last fall are blooming in earnest, some of them three feet tall with snowy white cups the size of giant’s ears. I call them my Jurassic lilies. The feral geranium has spread its leggy branches up a wall; the h doesn’t care for them but I love their classic red cheeriness, and besides, I told him, it’s a crime to not care for something that has managed to survive on its own all these decades. The h agreed and said he’d trim it, but did it so brutally I swear he was trying to kill it - he denies it, and points out how it is thriving now as if that proves anything.

Last summer the h trimmed back the rose bush that somehow survived untended for years; now it is bushy and healthy looking; last year this bush bore a single yellow rose, this year it should hold a crowd of them, I can’t wait.

The rubber tree sprouts new leaves every day. The fig trees have begun leafing out, soon their scarecrow silhouettes will disappear under a heavy drapery of leaves, creating a cave underneath with a rustling quiet that makes me understand why someone nicknamed figs “spirit trees” - it seems like the kind of place one would encounter a spirit…or try to summon one.

The loquats grow heavy with fruit, as does the bitter orange tree. The fully drained koi pond sits ready to be filled, the coral fountain and walls gleaming clean and white. Around the pond, the little bamboo forest is neatly trimmed of fallen and yellowed stalks.

Little Han Solo, the chick that survived the attack on his mama’s nest a few nights ago, pecks at the food on the floor of his box. This morning I took him out to the courtyard and some of the flock came to stand around me and see if I’d provide more food, but most were content from the morning feeding and stayed under the canopy. I spotted Han’s mama deep in the brush but it was too difficult to reach her. Could she not hear his cheeping call? It seems not. Meanwhile Han likes to gaze at the iphone screen.

There is no sun again today - the sandstorm winds from Africa continue to blow, warm and gusting. Occasionally it makes a howling sound that sounds almost sentient. The sky is an odd gray tinged with yellow, effectively blocking the sun so that the light is both bright and somehow dim at the same time. The chickens continue to behave as if rain is on the way, hiding under the canopy. It’s nice to have a chicken-free porch for a change, where Jake can lay on his bed unmolested.

This morning as I carried dishes over to the dishwasher at the quinta (passing Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett lounging on the wall), Alberto hailed me from the driveway and presented me with a bag of just-harvested snap peas. Do you know these? he asked, and demonstrated how to shell.

The onions and garlic in their raised beds are almost ready to harvest - in a few months we will have our favorite meal of roasted potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions and parsley and cilantro, with a side of braised cabbage, all from our garden.

Last night our guest Linda made us rigatoni with a buttery, peppery vodka cream sauce. We had a salad dressed with mustard vinaigrette on the side, and for desert the fabled Vienetta that Linda insisted on buying when she spied it in the freezer section of the grocery store.

Oh those are SO good, remember? she asked.

We never had anything like that when I was a kid, I told her. Things like Vienetta and Sara Lee were not in our family food budget - we were too poor for such extravagances, but mostly didn’t know it because everyone around us was in the same boat.

On the last trip to the store we bought a six pack of mini-Cokes. I like to save the bottles and use them as vases. I like the mini size, it’s just the right serving - Coke is too sweet to drink a whole regular sized can. When I see them in my fridge I always feel like I am getting away with something. Growing up poor meant only having soda on special occasions, and then only a cheap off-brand, like Shasta, which cost 11 cents a can when I was in middle school. Though the label featured a drawing of a mountain, I never made the connection that Mount Shasta was a real place until I actually climbed it. It was challenging and fun, even if there were not streams of root beer, strawberry and lemon-lime to be found fizzing down the slopes.

Mom sometimes drank Dr. Pepper, which had a dark cherry tate I liked, or Diet Rite, which had a chemical taste I did not. I didn’t drink a Coke until high school, where they served them at the snack bar, nor a Pepsi until I started working in a corporate office in my 20s, where the machines featured only Pepsico products. I never developed a taste for either though I retain a fondness for Barq’s root beer, which was the only non-cola product in the one vending machine on my high school campus, which for some reason was hidden away in the wrestling practice room. After track or cross country practice in the summer I’d get two cans of Barq’s, shotgunning one while standing on the squishy red wrestling mat that stretched wall to wall, then tossing the can in the trash before mounting my ten-speed and riding the three miles home - most of it uphill - drinking the second and burping loudly since no one could hear me.

So what did you think of your first Vienetta, Linda asked. I told her it was better than I expected. It tasted like expensive tasted when I was a kid. It’s probably not something I’d buy again though. At least not until the refrigerator is in the same house where I have my dinner. After slicing the Vienetta we forgot all about it and the remainder melted into a pool that I found on the counter before bedtime.

The noon whistle is blowing, surprising all of us. In the perpetual haze of the sandstorm, it’s hard to know what time it is just by looking outside. There is a sameness to every hour of the day. Time for lunch, which will be fresh eggs and wilted spinach from the property before I return to weeding.