No winter, no spring

Apparently it is spring in some parts of the world. My parents told me on the phone the other day that the daffodils I planted years ago at their farm have bloomed and faded.  My husband reminded me that taxes are due in less than a month.  But here in Guam, the sky and flora look just like summer, fall, and winter. 

It’s hard to keep track of the time when the seasonal markers are missing. The plumeria trees bloom perpetually. The bananas and palms seem to be in continuous fruit production. The mangoes, however, are just starting to fruit, and apparently only produce one crop a year.  And I am engaging in the springtime ritual of preparing a garden, thanks to my brother- and sister-in-law who sent some heritage seeds from the Hudson Valley. We’ll see how they do in Oceania. 

 

We’ve also set out some cuttings of bougainvillea and croton.  The kids accused me of stealing when I broke off the branch of a particularly deep magenta bougainvillea on the side of the road, but I tried to tell them I was encouraging stronger growth for the host plant and propagating a more beautiful island if I get this branch to root.  So many plants just seem to need some dirt to sprout.

It may not be the best time to do all this planting, since it has been relatively dry the past week.  Temperatures have been in the 90's, but it’s hard to tell, except when sitting in the direct sun at the soccer fields, since we’ve had such pleasant breezes.  Soccer isn't an indication of season here, either; the league plays all year round, to the dismay of my skin.  Although I wear a hat, sunscreen, and carry a sunbrella, I’ve noticed new age spots on my knees, alas. 

So I miss the time of year when the whole world seems full of promise and propagation. I miss the way the end of Lent coincides with the blooming of bulbs and flowering trees.  I wonder if someone on island grows Easter lilies, or if the Paschal altar will be adorned with orchids and bird-of-paradise and wild ginger. I'd like to wallow in a little self-pity that we don't have lilies-of-the-valley and lilacs here. 

But I honestly can't complain. On Saturday we spent the day at a party at one of the hotels that has a waterslide.  It also has beautifully landscaped grounds, ablaze in purple, yellow and magenta flowers.  The sun was shining, the kids and Japanese tourists were all smiling and bowing to each other as they jockeyed for position on the waterslide, the bartender was serving mai tais and pina coladas at the cabana, the water was turquoise.  And here we are, smelling like Coppertone SPF 80, trying to remind ourselves it's Lent.  So we didn't have any of the tiramisu. It was timely that I had just read the reflection from Benedictus for the Feast of St. Joseph:

"It is no accident that faith in God flows from a 'head sore-wounded,' from a crucified man, and that atheism has Epicurus for father and originates in the world of the satisfied onlooker."

The satisfied onlooker, that's me. A couple of days ago, I was driving across the island, and as I crested a hill, I was greeted by a stunning view of the horizon where the Philippine Sea met an especially vivid cloudless cerulean sky, framed by swaying coconut palms. It was a Wordsworthian moment transposed to the tropics.  The awe it inspired was intensified by the familiarity of having lived here half a year.    

It is easy to get together with other wives and sit around and complain about things like how hard it is to find certain products and to get repairs done correctly – we’ve taken our car in twice for air conditioning work, and it is still not fixed – but at the end of the day, we are blessed to have this experience, even though it wasn't the overseas assignment I would've asked for (Germany? Italy? the Far East?).  The kids are thriving, the pace of our life is steady but not harried, and we have ample opportunities to be filled with gratitude, despite the minor inconveniences and the feelings of displacement. The natural beauty of the island is sometimes obscured by trash and graffiti along the main road, but the ocean and sky are a source of perpetual wonder.  And since the mild weather allows outdoor activities all year long, we’re trying to take in as much of the natural beauty as we can.


The challenge of Lent perhaps is to figure out how to share this abundance of grace with others. The second part of that quote from Benedictus is "We must also learn that in addition to the Real Presence of Jesus in Church and sacrament there is that other, second real presence of Jesus in the least of our brethren, in the downtrodden of this world; he wants us to find him in all of them."  Being grateful is the first step, but not the last.
 

Does it have to be pretty to taste good?

On a recent trip to the flea market, I picked up what I thought were the local sweet potatoes. But I discovered when I sliced through the skin after baking them for an hour that I actually bought the purple-fleshed taro root. I had bought some before and tried to prepare it like a baked potato, but it was incredibly dry.  Disappointed, I stuck the baked taro in the refrigerator for a few days, until I finally tired of moving them out of the way.  Rather than just trash them, I found some recipes in old cookbooks my mother-in-law sent me.  I combined a couple recipes to make taro muffins. Fortunately, we have a stack of coconuts piled up on the side of the house, so I sent my 12 year old out to husk and grate one.  He was happy to oblige - who wouldn't want to set aside school work to impale coconuts on a husking spike and then whack them with a machete?

The resulting muffins were ugly and misshapen but tasted delicious with a texture like cake combined with a sweet chewy crumb.  I’ll probably never be able to duplicate the recipe, but it was something like this:

4 baked and mashed taro roots

Milk (about 1.5 cups?) and grated flesh (1 cup?) of a coconut

3 c. flour (I used part wheat flour)

2T baking powder

1 tsp salt

½ c sugar

6 T melted butter

2 eggs

Some nutmeg and cinnamon to taste

Mash taro with dry ingredients, add wet ingredients, blend and bake at 375 for about 20 minutes.  Then enjoy eating 75% of them before anyone else in the family catches on that they actually taste good. 

Experiential Learning in Practice

Tuesday was an unusually busy day for our house. We began the morning with a super sprint triathlon. My 7 year old did the whole thing: a 200 m swim, a 5 mile bike, and a 1.5 mile run.  He is a bundle of energy and was determined to complete it, after trying the event once before and not quite going the whole distance.  One of the wives has been organizing these practice triathlons for the past 9 months, and their popularity has grown from a group of about 8 or 10 participants to groups of 30+.  It’s a form of fellowship I enjoy a lot more than going out to lunch or shopping, and it’s been a great morale builder for some of the ladies, I think. The lady who organizes these events does nothing more than send a message on Facebook and invite people.  She measured the course and occasionally alters it because of construction or traffic on base, but for minimal effort, she has spread a lot of good cheer.

After a quick shower, we loaded up to head to the local university.  It was celebrating its 60^th anniversary with an open house and fiesta.  I was sorry to forget my camera because there were multiple photo opps.  The main quad was crowded with kids from area schools enjoying local music and dance performances and shopping at the booths for trinkets and food.  Many of the college clubs had set up tents and were earning money with carnival games and crafts. The education department had a tent set up with sensory integration games.  The nursing students had their medical dummies out on tables and demonstrated how to detect lung disease, how to insert an IV, and how to cleanse bedsores.  Inside the science building, the biology students had a lab open house where they displayed some of their specimen oddities: a conjoined fetal pig, a 1000 lb sea turtle head, a large flash frozen brown tree snake, and various other bones, shells, and bodies in formaldehyde. One student was skinning a dead cat, and a few others were answering questions.

After admiring all of the dead things, we went up to the planetarium to cool down and relax.  We were treated to a star show called “Chamorro Sky Legends.” After being antsy for a few minutes and asking questions, the kids finally settled in and enjoyed the slower pace of this program. My favorite line was from a story about an old fisherman who told his grandson that the sky was his television.  They would seek falling stars and make up stories about the constellations.

From the Guam Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources website

Our next stop was the agriculture department where the kids could admire one of the 40 or so surviving ko’ko birds, then study their predator, the brown tree snakes, and next watch rhinoceros beetle maggots decompose a piece of dead wood. From the botany department, I bought a couple bromeliads for 1/20 of the price at the plant store, and at the entomology department’s display, we identified some sphinx moths we had hatched from cocoons a week or so ago.  We had thought their wings were deformed from forming a cocoon in a pickle jar, but it turns out they are naturally narrow-winged.  Perhaps I should have known about sphinx moths from the years when my brother used to collect insects for 4-H competitions, but I had forgotten.

Sphinx moth hatching

The kids were ready to go after all this learning, but we listened to the endangered plant guy give us a spiel. I couldn’t tell much difference between some of the species. Nor did I take a free ironwood tree, because I have several sprouting in the eaves. Finally we strolled past the only dairy cow I’ve seen on Guam and a couple carabao, before stopping for kettle corn. The kids discovered they still had energy to jump in bounce houses, but when I found out the book sale at the library had closed – unfortunately, I had saved that stop for last, knowing it could be a time-trap – I corralled them for the drive home.

It was well worth the break from the school books.

Reading updates

A slow month for reading and blogging.  Life intervenes – home schooling, teaching the literature class, shuttling kids to events.  I thought with my husband gone for two weeks I’d get more reading done, but he returns soon, hurrah, and I haven’t finished a novel.  Lenten reading has taken precedence: rereading Benedictus in the morning; evening prayer, scripture, and poetry in the evening.  

Eventually, I'm going to pick out another book to read for Lent, but for now the rest of my reading has been for class, and it has been a pleasure.  Trifles by Susan Glaspell was popular, after Sophocles and Shakespeare. I never read this play as student, and I suspect it has been added to anthologies to provide gender diversity in the drama section.  It’s a short play by a woman about women’s issues: a repressed wife has strangled her husband, but her two neighbors conceal evidence.  The essays I scanned about it focus on the silencing of Mrs. Wright and the perceptiveness of the women characters.  All of the action takes place in the kitchen, and it’s the neighbor women, not the sheriff and county attorney, who notice the details that provide the missing motive to a murder.

Although the play does focus on the relationships between the women, it’s too bad if it is pegged as a gender-studies piece.  The idea that it’s the little things, the trifles, that define us, that form our character, applies generally.  The way we keep house – or farm, what we buy, or refuse to buy, the mementoes we hold on to, all reveal something about what we think is important, even if in themselves they seem inconsequential. 

Also overlooked in some of the commentary that I read is the guilt that Mrs. Hale feels for not having visited Mrs. Wright in over a year because her house isn’t cheerful.  If anything, it’s this failure, not her loyalty to her sex,that prevents her from condemning Mrs. Wright for murdering her husband. It’s this guilt that is the most powerful part of the play for me. How many times have I refused to look out for a neighbor in need? Neglected to call a friend because I was too busy? Avoided the talker at church because I wanted to get going?

It’s a guilt that convicts.

************

I also recently finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and was happy to have liked it so well, since it took a good chunk of time to read, and since I bought it for a book club that it arrived late for.  Because it’s been a bestseller, I thought it might disappoint, but perhaps low expectations allowed me to enjoy it more.

It’s the story of twin brothers, born out of a brief relationship between an Indian nun and a British doctor, who grow up in Ethiopia, and eventually come to America. It had a multinational flavor and some interesting twists.

The mother of the boys dies in childbirth, and a female doctor from India raises them.  Her goal is “to avoid the sheep life at all costs,” a phrase that makes me want both to itch and applaud. She ends up dedicating her life to these boys and a missionary hospital. It is a small life, but the details, the trifles, are colorful.

Another bit that gave me pause was the advice from the boys’ father-figure, as he prepares to die. He tells the son who narrates a story about a pair of slippers that kept coming back to the owner, who was trying to throw them out.  The moral of the story is this: “I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

In a way, this quote seems to contradict the one from Pope Benedict I posted a few days ago about how seeking success and fulfillment only for ourselves, makes us repugnant.  It is only in our ability to love others, to look outward, that we avoid bitterness and disillusion.  But in a way, they seem to parallel each other.  If we try to escape our identity, our roots, our appearance and abilities, we deny the vocation God gave us. We can’t compare ourselves to others, or seek to escape our responsibilities. 

The way it plays out in the book involves a series of pardons. The omissions are acts of forgiveness, which eventually are extended, so that book ends with a satisfying tying up of loose ends.  It’s a book that may not linger long past its bestseller shelf life, but I don’t regret the time I spent reading it.

 *****

Neither was the time spent scanning The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick a bad half hour.  The book is thick, but mostly pictures. My older boys had read it a few years ago, but in honor of the new movie recently released, it was front and center at the library, so the youngers breezed through it. I read it after I realized my seven-year-old wasn’t quite grasping everything.  It requires some inferences to be made that he wasn’t quite getting.  He’s not a strong reader yet, but he caught most of the main idea, and he enjoyed it, so I was happy to indulge his desire to see the movie, which of  course loses some of the magic of the book. On the other hand, it captures the magic of the silent films better that the book does. A trade-off. I’m just pleased that all the kids can sit and watch the same movie about the will to create without complaining about it being a baby movie, or a girl movie, or a boy movie, or a boring movie, or a violent movie. Enjoyed by all.