Some Days

Some days I realize where I am. Sometimes the realization comes as I help Irenes knead the morning's hojaldras on her wooden batea, the smell of coffee drifting from inside her yellow, mud hut. Sometimes I realize where I am as I stand sweating and dirty with Anacleto, hiding from the Panamanian sun noticing how puny a 500-pound pile of sand and gravel looks in comparison with the mountain of effort it took three people, hacking through the jungle, stepping over snakes and tarantulas to dig it from the river and haul it over slippery, moss-covered rocks in plastic saccos over our shoulders to get it there. Sometimes it hits me when we are out pasearing, “Damn, I am in this random Panamanian house, listening to this guy with only a couple of visible teeth who seems older than the hills and actually understanding what he is telling me about this palm fruit that he harvested this morning.” There are times when nothing on my plate is from a package. There is hand-ground maiz from the monte that Jeronimo carried home yesterday on horseback, packed in the husk and boiled to make bollos, guineo-chinos from the tree in the bottom corner of the property, yucca pulled from the rich Panamanian tierra negra, chicha made from lemons plucked off the tree this morning, or a sweet lemon tea from the limoncina plant that grows near the shower. Oh yeah, and then there is the chicken that I saw earlier that day with feathers still on it. Sometimes as I walk by the blue tienda with its new ceramic-tile bench in the morning and hear the friendly, “Buenas,” from Maria-Eugenia as she looks up from her sombrero-making, the fibers wrapped around her toes as she tightly weaves them into a ribbon to wrap around her wooden mold I think to myself, “No one would believe what I am doing right now.” No one would believe just how loud the rain is on the zinc roof. No one would believe how everyone here knows how to put every single different natural material to use. This type of wood makes better embers in this type of stove. This preparation of mud cured my son's auto-immune disease. This plant is for headaches. That plant makes peppers hotter than habeñeros and they look exactly like those from this plant that makes the sweet peppers we use in every single dish, don't mix them up. Sometimes I realize where I am when Panamanian folks start arguing about the best phase of the moon to cut wood. It seems silly to ask which is the best phase of the moon to visit Home Depot ™, which is how I “cut” wood. The stories we hear about the lives of people in our community are often of incredible hardship, but told with a smile and a selflessness that I won't ever forget. Parents harvesting a coffee plant, drying, grinding, and packaging fifty baggies to sell six hours away on horseback at the market. “Thankfully we sold a lot so we had enough money to buy our son's school supplies for first grade.” We even start losing our grip on science and proof and fact. It seems so logical that Baukti was born with a weak right leg because he was conceived after his dad almost died from an equis snakebite on his right toe. It is pretty weird. I can just be going about my day when I get one of those feelings of realization. I live in Panama now. I speak Spanish now. I drink coffee now. I still don't like rice now. Maybe the feelings of realization mean I am a little bit more conscious of just how different life can be around the world. Maybe they mean something else. Whatever they mean, the feelings are good and I like them.