A Day In The Life

This past winter was starkly different from my first winter in Jamaica. Last year the west side of the island was in a drought and we were fighting bush fires caused by a gleaming shard of glass under the suns intense rays. This year we had almost too much rain, and if you ask a farmer, that’s a tough threshold to surpass. Floods occurred and some poorly timed crops were swept away. I hardly complained since I finally own waterproof shoes and I love rain.

Since the start of March though, rain has slowed down to the brief evening shower, which cools down the place but adds nothing to peoples water catchment tanks. This morning I awoke to window panes and unlocked doors slamming in what I rose to realize is a pure and refreshing breeze under an azure blue sky. So I drink my coffee in my hammock and I revel in the sounds of the breeze in the leaves of so many tropical (and therefore finite in my life) plants.

The sugar cane bends willingly to the slightest puff of air, like the tune of lightly falling rain or a gently rolling stream. A reedy, percussive sound joins in as the puff becomes a gust, and the coconut trees join in with a beat. The fragile banana trees are the next song noticed, their big broad-leafed canopies lazily slapping each other and rubbing along leaf ridges so that you can almost, if you close your eyes, hear the sound of a zipper, opening and closing. Of course the mango tree’s trunk likes to creak and the breadfruit trees add their tenor to the star apple’s tiny soprano in the wind. During mango season, the breeze is often accompanied by the thud of warm, sweet fruit and birds quarreling in the canopy. The biggest and scariest thud though, is that of a falling breadfruit on the zinc roof of the CDC office. I jump every time.

If /when the electricity cuts off, I miss the familiar and mashed up sounds of three different radios blasting and echoing in the gulley. But the sounds of  the basic schoolers’ on the adjacent hill carry into my yard so well, I can’t help but laugh at some things 5 year old Jamaicans shout at each other during playtime. Of course we can’t forget that the birds are ever in song, the goats are bleating, roosters are crowing, the cows are mooing and that one. damn. donkey. won’t stop laughing in his fingernails to a blackboard kind of way.

It’s not just the sounds I’ve been noting as my departure nears, but the sights as well. I can walk down my street in the cool breezy hills and, looking straight ahead, the ocean spans out before me, meeting the horizon. At night, when the day has been dry, the tom-toms come out: big clumsy beetles with eyes that glow florescent green and an abdomen that flashes yellow as he flies. Perching in the reeds along the road, it looks as if the land has been overrun by miniature aliens.

Those nights when the stars are out in the millions and we don’t carry a light because the moon is enough, and I carry a sweater but don’t need it, and someone is deep frying chicken in a pot of oil over a wood fire set into a hubcap, and the pimento smoke and fried batter wafts into my nostrils, asking if I’m hungry. Passing the big star apple tree, the patoo (Jamaican Owl) calls in his haunting tone. Meanwhile someone is playing around on virtual DJ, mixing the sounds of old reggae under a top 40 pop song. Someone shouts, but I know they’re shouting a joke and not an insult…something that would have been hard to detect a year ago.

In the morning as I walk to school, trying desperately not to sweat too much, the spring is crowded with mothers washing their clothes, old 5 gallon jugs of what was once cooking oil are being filled with drinking water and lined up by family on the roadside, awaiting the next taxi coming up the hill. Some young men (like my one) don’t always wait and carry that jug all the way up, muscles bulging and sweating through their shirt. People are just coming back from bush at 10am as the sun starts to heat up, rubber water boots clomping against the pavement, dirt covered machete in hand, sometimes leading a donkey with plastic milk crates of reapings slung over its back.

Midday gets quiet: we sit in the shade along the road or retreat inside to avoid the sun. If I’m not busy somewhere, I tend to read or craft. When the school kids come home, one can hear them ascending the hill in a mass, slowly thinning out as the walk becomes longer. I get many visitors with homework questions or quarrels to dissipate and I often have to call them back with a sharp reminder to pick up their sweetie wrappers from my yard. Damn Picknie (mi love dem still).

I could go on, and may at some point, but sometimes a girl wakes up to a perfect lazy day and she just needs to write a little.