Easter 2018

Easter, Strawberries and power failure

                It feels like all my projects have gotten bogged down.  I have extended the town apartment rental by two weeks.  I go daily to the countryside to see what I can do to further a project, any project, along.  I wind up spending my time in the garden.

                The hamlet of El Pozole was hit with a transformer failure, which effectively shut down all electric power to the community.  It was restored to the rest of the community, except for a narrow band of us along the Paso de las Carretas road.  Almost a month has gone by; the utility company says it cannot find a replacement transformer.  This is scandalous.  It is hard to imagine.  The American mind says, write your congressman.  Write to the head of the utility company, to the head of the overseeing government body.  This is Mexico, however.  We funnel our complaints to the local utility office.  Even the folks living in Canatlan do not know of our situation.  We shut make signs and march in front of the local office!  Make noise, get attention, cause some embarrassment.  This is Mexico, however.  We impotently suffer in silence.

                Without power, I cannot run a hose to water my plants.  Juan had foresight, I don’t know how he figured it out.  In the first week of the power outage we had two days of power.  He grabbed an empty water tank, of the sort we put on the roof, and placed it next to the hose.  He then filled it with water, on the day there was power.  Or perhaps he just drained the already full tank on the roof, into the one on the ground.  After a while I bought a generator, and he used that to run the well pump one more time to fill the tank again.  From that water I have been able to fill buckets and carry water to the plants.  This is time consuming and exhausting, but the plants struggle on.  Now the tank is almost empty, the buckets do not fill because I cannot reach the water level, and I have let Juan go.  He has finished the brick work, I cannot justify keeping him on the payroll.  But how will I get the water tank filled again?  I must buy a very long extension cord to hook the generator up to the well pump.  I think Juan simply put the generator into a wheelbarrow and carried it over there.  I cannot do that.

                On Maundy Thursday I met Juan, paid him what I owed, and let him know I didn’t have any more work for him now.  I had gathered his tools in one spot, where he could collect them.

                When I went out to the house, I found that he not only had removed all his tools, but also the tools that belonged to Luz de Compasion.  He had put them in the locked shed.  I had lost my keys to that shed a week earlier.  Now the wheelbarrow, the shovel, and the electric extension cord were locked away beyond my reach.  How annoying!  I had been using the wheelbarrow to carry water to the strawberry patch.  I needed it to carry the generator closer to the pump.  Even the shovel; without water, there were still things I could do around the property.  Since I suspect him of having the keys I lost, I find this to be an unkind act.  Of course, I could be wrong in my suspicion.  He was there when I lost the keys.  He was giving me a lift to my bike which had run out of gas.  I used the key ring when I unlocked and relocked the main gate as we left.  This key ring reminded him of the other I had left behind at Doug’s house; he asked me if I had retrieved them from under the mat. 

                I have not seen the gate key since that day.  It was attached to a calf hide change purse I had bought in Italy a year ago.  I was sorry to lose it.  I had also just folded a 500 peso note into it that morning.  Juan usually does not lie directly.  His is more often the lie of omission.  So when I asked him point blank if he picked up the keys, his ‘no’ should leave no room for doubt. 

                A flash of déjà vu. My black purse which I last saw under the table at Esther and Iloy’s house, that which contained my passport and Verizon phone, has never been seen again.  They swore I did not leave it behind.  What other conclusion can I draw, but that I have a poltergeist playing games with me.

                Easter weekend arrived.  I love the rituals surrounding this holy time.  I have a collection of lovely memories of rekindling the light into the church upon Christ’s resurrection.  I flash back to the old city of Jerusalem, sitting one story up on a Muslim call-to-prayer tower, watching the drama unfold in the courtyard of an old church.  In the high-plateau town of Westcliff, Colorado, a Filipino priest at the lovely church there rekindled the flame on the doorstep of the church.  In Kangding, the church is on the second story; the fire was lit on the balcony as we all crowded around.  Back further, I see myself sitting in a darkened church in Hendersonville, North Carolina, as the light is carried into the church as the words of scripture are acted out at the altar, and one by one from the back of the church the flame is passed candle to candle until the church is ablaze. But this year, thanks to the cantankerous Jim, I missed the heraldry. 

                Jim gave me a bunch of strawberry plants.  How nice!  However, I had no place prepared for strawberries.  I read up online, and discovered I needed to create a raised bed of porous material with good drainage and topped with mulch.  I needed to run down to Home Depot and pick up some peat moss and 9-9-9 fertilizer.  Oh, wait.  There is no Home Depot in Canatlan.

                I left the plants under a small shade tree for the few days while I tried to free up time to create this special bed.  I spent hours shoveling dirt from one of the many mounds left by the backhoe onto a 9 meter square plot of land.  My yard is still piled high with these mounds of dirt, leaving no room for such a bed.  I have had to use common land at the far side of where my garage will go.  I did what I could to add porous material, by gathering up dried horse dung and rubbing the clods between my hands to release the fine straw.  I worked it as best I could to the soil, but I was concerned about too much nitrogen being introduced.  I am not a chemist, I do not know what other chemicals and minerals dried horse manure contains.  I am only focusing on texture.

                I had done a rough count and figured I had 9 plants.  But as I soaked them in water to loosen the roots, I discovered I had 14 plants.  Some were healthier than others.  I did my best to put them in the soil, then spent considerable time carrying water out to them.  This used up the last of the storage tank.

                One day I went to my neighbor, Armando.  He had borrowed my generator the other day to water his bed of beans, planted in his home garden and thus not serviced by the waterline from the dam.  That water is meant for the orchards and planted fields, not for our home gardens.  He kept it overnight and returned it the next day. 

                I asked him if he might help me bring the generator to the pump’s electric connection, which is 50 yards away from my house.  By this time I had borrowed the crucial key from Juan to open that storage shed, where the wheelbarrow, shovel and electric extension cord are stored. 

                Armando is a great guy.  His body is sun-browned as a berry and lean.  His gray hair is shaved close to his head.  He is an easy-going guy.  His house is just down the road from mine, on the other side of the road closer to the creek.  He comes readily, without hesitation.

                He puts the generator into the wheelbarrow and wheels it down the lane to the edge of the field.  I have grabbed the extension cord from the shed, and connected to the junction box that hangs on the outside wall of Jhampa’s empty house.  As I try to carry the long extension cord out to the edge of field where Armando waits, I find that the cord is hopelessly tangled.  Armando comes up to me and together we try to untangle it.  Eventually we manage, he plugs the generator up and fires it on.  Now we wait until the main tank, on top of the shed, overflows.  We go back to my house to wait.  He begins dipping a bucket into the near-empty tank, and carries water out to the strawberries.  I am busy distributing the new soil to the beds.  What I have so far growing is only a double row of snow peas, and arugula.  There are also the two scraggly tomato plants I rescued from Doug’s sewer line on the day the backhoe came.

                What is this new soil I am adding to the plants?  On Good Friday a very kind plumber came to my rescue.  His name is Antonio.  He is on the City payroll; he is the guy who turns on and turns off the water every day.  The municipal water is, for some obscure reason, turned off every night at 6 p.m.  It is his job to go around to the various valves and close them.  I have called him in the past to consult on the water situation at Luz.  This time I called him to solve a problem inside the house.  When the house was built, six years ago, it was done apparently without the help of a trained plumber.  When I went to install the sink cabinet that I had bought at Home Depot in December, it did not fit.  That is, the fixtures and drain were placed haphazardly.  The faucets were too high, and the drain rose out of the floor instead of the wall.  The cabinet did not fit!  Juan had chipped away the tile and brick to expose the water pipes.  He left the pile of debris on the floor, along with his tools, and walked away.  It stayed that way for days.

                Antonio came out on Thursday to look at my problem.  Being already on a payroll, Antonio did not ask for much compensation.  I gave him money to buy what materials he needed, and he promised to return the next day.  When he came, his wife and daughter were in his Jeep.  They stayed there while he went into the house to begin his work.  It took him a few hours.  I passed by the car door and introduced myself.  I chatted with his wife a bit, suggesting she get out of the car and sit somewhere more comfortable.  (Where?  Neither Mike’s house nor Doug’s house have a sitting area; Jhampa’s house is completely empty and unfinished.  My house is a mess.)    I noticed the ‘child’ in the back seat.  I got the impression of mental disability; the child is handicapped in some way.  The hair was short, the face square and unsmiling.  Her mother introduced her, Soni, and revealed that it is a girl.  I could not tell.  She could have been eight or eighteen. 

                I would go by the car and chat a little more, about the weather and the garden and such.  Eventually I rambled on about the strawberries, and how I needed to get to Durango to buy peat moss and fertilizer.  She also is a recipient of some of Jim’s strawberry plants.  She said to me that I did not need to go to Durango, that what I needed was right here on the farm.

                At that point, she got out of the car and walked me over to the pesky nettle trees.  We grabbed a hoe, a bucket and a dustpan.  Under the tree, she scraped with the hoe and piled up the loose soil there.  She said this was perfect material for loosening and feeding the soil around the plants.  We worked, scraping up two buckets full.  Meanwhile, Soni slept in the backseat.

                She saw the two pots containing the gladiola plants.  She said the flowers would never be able to break through the packed earth.  We dumped them out on a square of cardboard, and replanted them using this newly gathered soil.

                This woman’s visit was a great blessing.  I would love to have her as a friend.  She would not use my name, but called me ‘doña’, far more formal than ‘señora’.  I am stymied by the classist feature of the Canatlan society.

                When Armando came that day, he saw what was left in a bucket and smiled.  He recognized it immediately, and named the tree that created this good soil.

                Animatedly I expressed my frustration with this power situation.  I said, in the States we would band together and march with placards.  He said he and our neighbor, Mr. Reyes, were planning on going to the CFE office tomorrow to talk with the engineer.  I agreed to join them.

                The engineer had just come back from vacation.  He was still getting up to speed.  He heard our complaints very calmly, speaking with a smile and a soft voice.  He mumbled something about there not being enough trucks, parts, etc.  We did our best to put pressure on him.  A couple days later I was in the office to pay my bill, so I popped in to his office to see how he did with his phone call to Durango, the head office of the district.  He said he called, he left a message, but they haven’t called back.  He said he thought he should look at the resources in the field and see if he couldn’t find one transformer that wouldn’t be missed, and could borrow it to install at our site.  Hmmm.  At any rate, he said, by Thursday he would find us a solution.  Meanwhile, my city apartment rent is up, so it is time to move out to the country.  Without electricity?  I briefed Armando.  He said if we don’t have power by Thursday afternoon, we would make a visit to the Canatlan Mayor and see what she thinks of the situation.

                I am slowly learning the native ways of this place.  I look forward to the uncovering of so much more, as I grow closer to this new home land of mine.