I follow very few blogs, and even those I don’t read every day–no time.  But one I enjoy is written by Jonna, a US ex-pat in Mérida, Mexico; she has contributed comments to this blog a number of times.

Her post of 24/11 is a wryly humorous account of an absolute nightmare of a situation she had with her three dogs yesterday morning.  I have a vivid imagination when it comes to crisis situations, and it was easy for me to empathize with her, too easy!  But Jonna is such an excellent writer that I found myself laughing until I was nearly crying at an account of a situation that no one in their right mind would want to experience.  Yet, it’s one of those that, if you can keep a shred of objectivity, does have its humorous side, and Jonna brings that out beautifully.  Do check out the post.

I’ve added a link to her blog on the right sidebar under Blogroll.  It’s an interesting look at ex-pat urban life in a large, sophisticated city in Mexico.  Not my cup of tea, but I enjoy reading about it.

How many banana bunches can you find?

My dentist’s office (in the US), like many others, had copies of the wonderful magazine, Highlights for Children.  For children?  Hey, this mid-60 year old never minded waiting because I would grab a copy and go straight to the hidden pictures section.  You know, there’s a big drawing of something, a landscape, and you have to find the spoon, the kite, the fish, the bird, or whatever, cleverly hidden within the design.  Or how about those pictures on the Web, where you try to find fifteen horses inside the main picture?  I usually only get eleven or so, never the full number.

Well, here we have something like that.  Five years ago, we planted two small banana “trees”–young plants from somewhere, I forget who gave them to us.  Depending on the variety, it takes 15 -18 months before you get your first flower.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think we were near the 15 month end.  How we ooh’d and aah’d over the flower!  I’d seen them before, in Brasil, but not right from the very first and through a ripening–I’d only seen them on stalks that were nearly ready for harvest.  About 4 months later, we cut down that stem and harvested our first stalk.  I can’t remember how many hands–not many.  And we had our first experience with sharecroppers, while suspending the stalk from a cariola near the water tank, fruit bats, birds–and a certain four-legged resident of the house.  Still we had our first bananas and we were thrilled.

Maybe 6-8 months later, another flower appeared.  We had another, bigger stalk.  Banana bread entered our life in a minor way.

However, from each plant you get a blinkin’ grove.  In fact, you have to keep the number of young plants coming from one mother stalk down to four.  Which we did, mainly through Darío’s efforts.  But the bananas kept coming, and we began to share them with our neighbor, who bakes a mean banana bread herself.  Our freezer started to fill up.

Five years later, we have what amounts to a mini-plantation in back of the kitchen.  When the 2nd flower of this particular batch showed up, we were a litle concerned.  When the 3rd one appeared about 2 weeks ago, panic set in.

Yesterday, we woke up to a 4th flower.  Not even the neighbors are going to be able to handle this excess!  I think hysterics are justified.

So maybe we and the neighbors can start a bakery, churning out banana bread, and selling it to eke out additional income!

Check out the picture above and see how many banana bunches you can find.  (Hint: click on the picture to make it larger).
Added later:

Mary reminded me that we saw one of those Find-All-The -Horses pictures at Riego (I think that’s the name), the agricultural supply store on the Interamericana as you go to Frontera–it’s close to Tia Maria’s.  A really nice, big picture, hanging on the wall.  Mary looked for the horses while I bought shade cloth.

Most Americans dislike fruitcake, having had only the commercial versions which are awful.  Dry, tasteless–if that’s all there were, I’d say yes, leave that out of your cuisine.

But many years ago, I happened across a fruitcake recipe in Craig Claireborne’s The New York Times Cookbook (which was a mainstay of my kitchen for years) and I thought I’d try it.

It was utterly fantastic.  You soaked the fruit in rum for at least 24 hours before baking, then stored the cakes for a minimum of four weeks, sprinkling them with rum twice a week.  Let me tell you, nothing like the commercial stuff!  My kids loved them.  They used to bring back loaves to school, since it was a perfectly legitimate way to bring alcohol into the dorm.  They traded slices to their friends for favors (including, I understand, dates).  Under the laws at that time, it was probably illegal to drive with an opened loaf in the car.

Then, when we moved here, The New York Times Cookbook was among those books that somehow didn’t make it with us.  And I didn’t think fruitcake was something that was eaten in the tropics, anyway.

It most certainly is, especially in the Caribbean.  And last year, we bought fruitcake at Super Baru, I believe–and discovered that it was good.  Clearly, Panamanians enjoy fruitcake as well.

So this year, I decided to bake some again.  I couldn’t find Clairborne’s recipe but got something very close to it online.  Getting the fruits was easy–the stores have had plentiful supplies for at least two weeks, about the time they started putting out Christmas stuff.  I soaked the fruits from Friday to Sunday, then yesterday baked two loaves.  They are now wrapped, absorbing their first rum soaking (sprinkling doesn’t quite describe what I do), waiting until Wednesday, when I ’sprinkle” again.  Fortunately rum is cheap here.

What interested me was the Caribbean tradition.  For many cooks there, fruitcake means soaking the fruits in rum for an entire year!  Mary, who thinks all of this is a fine idea, is making noises like we should do the same now.  Sure–and where are we going to put 5 lbs of rummy fruit for a year?  No idea.

I used to bake fruitcake Thanksgiving weekend, but this year I’m a week ahead.  since traditionally we never ate the fruitcake until Christmas Eve, that gives it 5 weeks to brood in their cups.  We figure that one loaf will go to the Espinosas as a Christmas present, which is the perfect sort of gift in Panamá.  The other we’ll nurse for as long as we can.

And today I started watering.  Just the potted plants out back–pineapples, corotú, tomatoes, others–but until today, I hadn’t done any watering for months.  We haven’t had any rain since Wednesday.  Threatened yesterday, but nothing.

Added later:  November’s rain graph.

My brother Al lives in the Phoenix area; his house borders an arroyo.  He read my blog post about the fer-de-lance sighting, and contributed  from his own experience, both in Arizona and while in the Air Force.  I thought they were interesting enough to share:

I was on your website this morning and read about your encounter with the snake.  Revived some old memories of years gone by. The snake (the timber rattler variety) was my main staple when going thru survival training before deploying to Vietnam back in the ’60s.

One was given one days ration and we had to live off the land for an additional 9 days.  Snakes, rabbits, bugs were part of the main menu, along with anything else that happened to come within range.  We had to trap most of our food, since all we had was a minimal survival kit.  You would be surprised what you would be hungry enough to eat.

We have had a few encounters here around our property.  One 7 footer was calmly slinking up our driveway one afternoon, decided to make a right turn and go into the back yard for a tour.

Another time I found one (about the same size) drinking out of our pool hanging over the waterfall.

Both, with a lot of urging on my part, were sent on their way back down the arroyo from whence they came.  While it is not illegal to kill rattlers, it is frowned upon, for they keep the rodent population down.

I was intrigued with his survival story, and wrote back, asking him how the snakes tasted (Italian to the end).  I was also curious as to how he got rid of the rattlers in his yard:

Believe me that during the third day when the last of “c” rations were finally eaten, everything looked good…..bark, grass, leaves…..anything looked good.  I suppose that it tasted like chicken…but I ate so fast I don’t think there was time for the taste to register.  Survivor training is a good place to lose weight, just from lack of food.  I think I lost close to 15 pounds duing that time.  And at that time, if you remember, I had a pretty svelte body to begin with (;-D)

With a very long pool brush and pole (extended approx 12 feet) for the one by the waterfall, and a garden hose going full blast for the one that got in the back and camped out under a bush by the master bedroom.

And  eventually, the first one wouldn’t go where I wanted it to go,…..got it out of the back and onto the driveway…..where it stood its ground.

I didn’t want to shoot it, because then every county deputy would be rousting me for discharging a weapon within the town limits………..called the fire Dept…..they captured it and took it back down to the bottom of the arroyo behind the house and released it.  Neither one was very happy about being chased away from where they wanted to be.

The one by the waterfall, I used the pool pole and kind of flipped him over the retaining wall and into the arroyo.

In survivor training, you disconnect that portion of your brain dealing with fear, and pump up the foraging for food section.  Besides….when one is that young, one feels basically immortal.  That feeling went away several months later.

The last sentence refers to being deployed to Vietnam.

Last weekend, it began to feel like maybe the weather was about to change.  I noticed while weed whacking that the grass wasn’t behaving the same–it looked the way it does in early summer after the rains have stopped.  The Panamanians began saying that summer had arrived.  Wednesday, I think it was, we still got some rain and the skies still looked like winter.  Thursday we woke up to summer.  The skies and clouds looked like summer, with clouds piled against Volcan Barú.  Yesterday, the same.

Today it’s overcast, but it still feels like summer.  In November, it usually starts drying up, but we still get rain, as we do in December; it’s just that the amount drops off sharply (usually).

Still summer  is here.

Yesterday (Thursday), we had one of our Reading Program sessions at the library, and I brought up six books sent by Charlie and Martha Callahan that I had picked up on Tuesday.  Five were by Dr.Seuss; one of those was Como el Grinch Robó la Navidad–or How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  There was a very serious-looking girl there this time.  She had come to the library with her younger brothers, who were there for the reading program–clearly, though, she wasn’t interested in either Nedelka or Harry Potter.  So I pulled out Como el Grinch Robó la Navidad from the box it came in, and even had to remove the shrink wrapper.  I handed it to her with a smile.

She immediately sat down with the book, and for all she knew or cared, the building could be burning down around her and she wouldn’t have noticed.  She was immediately and instantly totally absorbed in the book.  Nedelka asked me to bring her a book, so I brought over Un Pez, Dos Peces, Pez Rojo, Pez Azul–or, One Foot, Two Foot, Red Foot Blue Foot.  When Nedelka began reading it aloud, the younger kids immediately perked up; one young boy, who had been doing a puzzle, stopped playing and brought a chair around to Nedelka’s side so that he could see the book better.

Naturally, I had neither camera nor camcorder with me.  But trust me, it was a marvelous sight, those kids utterly entranced by the wonders of Dr.Seuss.  Those books are magic for children everywhere.

Some time this week, I had also been to Mall Chiriquí, to the bookstore Hombre de la Mancha, to try to buy Harry Potter 1 in Spanish; we need more copies for the Harry Potter Reading Circle.  Unfortunately the young man I’m used to dealing with, who is from Potrerillos Arriba and who is quite knowledgeable, was not there.  Instead there was a muchacha who appeared to be quite nervous.  Mary and I looked for Harry Potter.  What we found was one copy of Harry Potter 4 in Spanish and 3 copies of HP7–in English.

The store had suddenly filled with children’s books–a good quarter to third of the stock.  I imagine because of Christmas.  We looked at a number of the books, and were quite frankly unimpressed with them.  They were fairly unimaginative, not at all like much of the children’s literature that you see in the states.  All were in Spanish and none of them were of the quality that we now have in the Potrerillos library, thanks to our US donors.  There was exactly one copy of a Dr Seuss book in Spanish–Green Eggs and Ham, which we’ve had from the first batch of books to get here.

My next adventure was to try to order Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, HP1 in Spanish.  I wanted 2 copies–we need them for the group.

Well, I tried, I really did.  She clearly didn’t believe that I wanted TWO copies of the same book.  No one does, of course.  and maybe the gringa really doesn’t know how to speak Spanish.  No matter that I told her it was for a library.  spanish-speaking gringas don’t buy books in Spanish andif they do, they don’t want 2 copies.

We went through an order FOUR TIMES.  I even wrote it out.  And STILL she asked me how many copies I wanted.  And then held up two fingers!

I’m not noted for patience; that I didn’t strangle her where she stood is major evidence in my favor that I probably will not commit murder in this lifetime.  Maybe she took that order and did something useful with it–and maybe not.  She said she would call me.  Tomorrow we go into David on our regular weekly shopping trip, and I’ll stop by the bookstore to see if the order really went through.

Whatever effort I put in, though is worth it.  Today, as I was bringing the box of books into the library, the boy across the street, who is part of the Harry Potter Reading Circle, was carrying a rake, following his older brother who had a weed whacker.  He gave me this huge smile and said, “Are we reading today?”  After I said yes, he raised his rake in salute, and still grinning from ear to ear, followed his brother.  Turns out, they were taking care of the library grounds.  After he was done, he came running in, sat down next to me along with another boy, and we started reading.  Enilda joined us, so that four–which is turning out to be the magic number for our reading circle–were present.  The boy is an excellent reader, and hates NOT to read aloud!  Which is why we need more copies, because he’s most reluctant to share his copy.  If someone else is reading, he wants to read along.  So he and I “shared” my copy, and Enilda and the other boy shared the library’s copy.

These kids are fascinated by the books.  It is a marvelous experience to be present, to watch them be utterly absorbed in the stories, see a generation of young readers born and nurtured.

I’ve just finished the book and can recommend it now without qualification.  The story of the US enterprise is every bit as absorbing as what went before.  McCullough’s great strength in this book is the way he tells the story of the construction of the canal by focusing on the major–and minor–personalities involved.

There’s an enormous amount to recommend this second part of the book, and it doesn’t do it justice to focus on just a few aspects at the expense of others.  But I do want to mention McCullough’s look at the caste system (his words) that existed during the time.  There was a color line–white on one side, mainly Americans, and all the others–West Indians mainly but not entirely.  He quotes extensively from West Indian sources, those available, who talked about their experiences.  He also shows that the facilities and services (with the exception of medical) were separate but as usual in these situations, hardly equal.  It is a balanced, fair look as far as I can make out.

There is a very brief section on the relations between Panamanians and the gringos.  And an even briefer few paragraphs on the alleged (by Panamanians) corruption of Amador as president.  I found myself wishing for more on both accounts, but that isn’t the focus of the book, only a relevant sideline.

The taming of the Culebra Cut was exciting–as was the earthquake that occurred four days after the canal was finished!

I found the last chapter, on the finishing of the canal, overwhelming.  McCullough tries to give a sense of the immensity of the task, but the numbers grew to be too much for me to take in–and I like statistics of that sort.  But even if your eyes glaze over, it’s all still very much worth reading.

I don’t care whether you live in Panama or not or never intend to set foot in the country–the story of the greatest engineering undertaking til that time–in fact, the greatest organized endeavor ever until that time–is a must read.

Mary did up the October weather report, which is published on our weather site here.

There has been so much going on this past week that I haven’t had a chance to post about our first papaya harvest.  Mary has done what she calls a “papaya documentary.” Taking my usual shameless advantage of her photography, I’m going to use her photos here.

Because of various fruit predators–both winged and four-footed–when the papaya began to ripen seriously, I protected it with an old orange bag.  Then, when it was just about all yellow, we decided to harvest the papaya–we’d seen far greener papayas at our fruit stand.

Harvest helper Lucy

Luscious fruit

But the proof is in the taste, so..

The left half and the guilty spoon show where I, who will never set records for patience, had a taste test ahead of the documentation.  It was delicious!  Much better than equivalent papayas we’ve bought.  But it wasn’t entirely ripe.  You can see at the top and just underneath the skin that the flesh is a lighter color.  It could have used at least one more day on the tree.  So, we know with the next one.  But most of it was ripe and what was made up for what little we lost.

We have two more on this tree and I think five on the one Hawaiian, one of which is definitely starting to ripen.

"Hawaiian" papayas

Our little farm is beginning to bear fruit.