A Quiet Morning

For breakfast my standard offerings vary from oatmeal with sliced fresh bananas – or yeast-raised banana fritters, deep-fried and battered banana chunks, banana pancakes, fried plantains (cousin of banana), sautéed banana strips, or egg dishes with yet more bananas sliced on the side. Note: Diagonal slices dipped in yogurt and brown sugar are also nice; from experience I do not recommend attempting banana curls or scalloped bananas.

Today Pecos is cooking for us. He is making itched eggs (otherwise known as scrambled, several countries north of here) with peppers and onions and is peeling green bananas to boil on the side. Delicioso! Boiled green bananas are often served in local restaurants as a side dish, ordered or not. They cook quickly and with added salt and butter taste like white potatoes, only better with an unexpected dense texture and corn flavor. From a nearby wild tree Pecos cut a rack of bananas with more than 70 fruits on it, thus our daily consumption. To protect it from birds and insects the rack is covered with a burlap bag and hangs from a post in the yard.

Pecos is trying to build a set of bookshelves from slab wood. This will keep him busy for hours, if not days. I’m doing some writing for work and congratulate myself for having finally become a one-person, paperless society. Back in the States I used one to two reams of paper per month. Here, grant narratives and budgets roll around in my laptop and in my head.

As I write, a tight flock of about a dozen red and yellow parrots suddenly burst from our jungle patch and chirp loudly all the way to a distant tree where they descend quickly and are silent again. I’ve read that many visitors to Costa Rica are taken aback to find that the forests are very quiet at times. They’re surprised again when a sudden loud chatter of birdsong erupts from flocks of birds that burst from nearby trees.

I can hear someone singing a good distance away over the bawling of a small herd of cattle being moved to fresher pasture on the mountainside. It turns out to be our landlord, who comes over later to tell us our utility payments are due -- $14 total for water and electricity for the month.

A dirt bike or two putter in the distance and I hear the familiar “Yo!” being called in greeting. Besides ‘yo’, the other greeting when quickly passing someone on foot or by vehicle isn’t the hello of hola or buenas dias. Instead, it is adios. This makes sense, as when you pass someone you are leaving them, so it’s goodbye – much like the hours of this fleeting morning. 