Weekends in Cusmapa

The couple pics get creepier and creepier.

Don't look so happy Burt!

What's with this Flat Stanley business? Bet he likes cross-dressing too.


While there is certainly no “normal” to any weekend I spend here, there are quiet and lovely moments during long weekends spent in this pueblo. Saturday mornings I wake up early with the roosters and Lauren clinking coffee mugs in the kitchen. In this way I rise most days, with first thoughts of a cup of steamy gasoline- the black gold which starts every day. Normally Lauren and I sit quietly enjoying the morning tranquility, watching steam rise off the patio bricks as sun filters through the orange tree branches into our kitchen windows. This Saturday we have a slew of guests- Stephanie, Mike, and Kate are all here visiting for the weekend. During the week Lauren does a vast majority of the cooking because 1) she’s GREAT at it, 2) she likes it, and 3) well…. I suppose that about covers the reasons. Point being, Saturday mornings I am unofficially in charge of brunch. Most of the time I make a big batch of banana pancakes but lately I’ve taken to zucchini bread (with freshly chopped nutmeg and loads of almonds and raisins).

Wandering in and out between the breakfast table and the patio, I stretch as if I were a cat in my past life, breathing in deeply and soaking up the golden morning’s light. I like to bring a book out to the hammock, pretend to read for a few minutes, and take naps off and on while pondering the clouds. When we have visitors, late morning often involves a stroll around town to buy dinner supplies- tomatoes, onions, garlic, flour, eggs… and whatever kind of beverage sounds right for the occasion. This Saturday’s dinner menu (because Mike is fabulous) includes rosemary foccacia bread and calzones with a mountain of fillings- olives, pineapple, fresh basil and spinach (from our garden), beer-fried onions, cuajada (fresh cheese), queso seco (literally: “dried cheese” which is basically cuajada that’s been aged), zucchini, summer sausage (thanks to mom’s Christmas gifts), and some wicked marinara sauce courtesy of Kate Fanale (our very own beard-painting maestro). Lazy Saturdays often also mean a game of Scrabble which includes much lollygagging and usually some snacks.

This late-morning Saturday I help Chelemancho (the gardener, “Cusmapanian of the Month” himself) plant garlic, melon, zucchini, cucumbers, snap peas, and green beans. He’s so pleased with how our garden’s coming along- we’re about to harvest a round of spinach and lettuce and also have carrots, red onions, tomatoes, bok choi, celery and eggplant sprouting like mad. I love getting my hands muddy! The smell of earth, our dark musty mother, and dirt under my fingernails… things I cherish. I walk out the front door every day and think “my god, the plants have grown overnight!” Plants really are miracles. A community garden could do so much good in a place like Cusmapa if it had the right structure and support. Chelemancho shows me pictures in a photocopied gardening book to inform me that it’s perfectly normal to put a bit of liquor on your plants and in the soil in order to deter pests. We chuckle gleefully about all the drunken ants and beetles we’re going to have in the garden. Marcos, one of our students, helps me plant the garlic cloves one by one, telling me all sorts of information such as: melons like growing in sand. I’m not sure if that’s true or not but either way I’ve become fairly good at nodding my head and “ooooh”-ing in a way which generally convinces people that I believe what they’re telling me. It’s a talent I’ve picked up in this last 13 months of only picking up 5-70% of what people say to me. I make presumptions about what they’re saying, so I assume they’re allowed to make presumptions about what I’m thinking.

Some little ones come over to draw for a bit… we have 5-7 groups of kids who come over on a regular basis, especially when we’re around for the weekend. This Saturday Jobeling and her five siblings visit for a few hours and marvel over an illustrated guide to the animal kingdom (probably the best book we have in the kid books sector) while coloring and giggling. The main groups of visiting kids are look something like this:

1) Anyelka (13), Jubelkis (12), Tonio (8), Jader (6), and el Pipe (Luis) (3)
2) Aleyda (14) & Marlon (9)
3) Marcos (14) & Christian (12)
4) Jobeling et al. (I know few of their names but mostly they’re things like: Hamilton (pronounced am-IL-ton) and Hanjel (I think they meant Angel)

I must digress into a lovely story about Jobeling’s family… which illustrates a grand sentiment I feel on a daily basis here: that of being a circus side-show. As a good friend of mine, Katie Meyer once wrote “sometimes I feel like I’m a discovery channel show”, and there is no better way to describe the feeling one gets being a gringo living in Cusmapa. The first time Jobeling and her siblings came to the house, Lauren caught them trying to climb our fence to get maracouyas from one of the trees and invited them in to the yard to search for whatever fruit they could find. The next time they came over was while my mom and Cece (sis) were visiting, when we’d had an absolute revolving door of kids in and out the entire day. Lauren and I were sitting outside reading and knitting and the kids came and just sat together in a bunch and silently open-mouth stared. We tried over and over to get a response but to no avail, so finally we started joking around with them a bit. The conversation between Lauren and I went something like this:

L: “Do you think they know we’re witches?”
C: “Hmmmm. I don’t know. But witches do love eating small children for lunch.”
L: “MMMMM. Yes, you’re right. Children are very delicious to eat.”
C: “Yes, especially the little ones. I’m hungry.”

It sounds bad (and looks bad I suppose, when written in this context) but we were laughing the whole time and I assumed the kids realized we were joking. I left the patio for a moment to get a drink of water and came back to see poor Jobeling crouched in the corner, back to the wall, bawling. Turns out Pedro (our dreadlocked dread-inducing friend- every child here thinks his hair is made of snakes) came home and caught on to the joke, and tried to get in on the giggles, but instead told Jobeling it was “lunch-time” while she was backing up into a corner in which she could not escape. Thank god for Lauren, who pulled herself together enough to calm the kiddo down because Pedro and I were laughing and laughing (as was Jobeling’s little brother). I suppose I learned my lesson about being sarcastic here… especially when I’m already a national geographic spectacle who does not go to church.
So Jobeling finally overcame her fear of the white witches and brought her brothers and sisters over to the house for an afternoon of drawing. When they leave, we hike up to the “mirador”, my favorite place in town to watch the sunset over the mountains of Honduras. This Saturday we see all the way to the ocean, there are some estuaries which curve in and out of the shoreline and the sun sets directly behind them, reflecting brilliant light. I love the sunsets here, when the “chicharas” sing the dusk with a monotone buzz I feel droning through every bone in my body. They say the sun sinks faster in Nicaragua. Rushing toward the horizon, it caresses the mountains with its last scarlet rays.

We visit Anyelka’s family’s house with the whole gringo parade to bring them a photo album full of pictures I’ve taken this past year of the kids. It’s wonderful to watch them all pour over the photos, with Luis emphatically exclaiming “YO!” and any other name of a person he recognized. We’re trading Blanca Clementina (mom) clothes washing for some wood we purchased to help repair their roof before the rainy season (it was collapsing), so we chat with her and Nicholas (dad), and leave the house with four of the boys noisily leading the way. Here comes the DANCE PARTY segment of the weekend, induced of course, by Marlon. Marlon’s one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen, he has entirely original interpretive Napoleon Dynamite-esque moves. Eight of us whirl around the living room to folk music from the Atlantic coast, the four of us “old ladies” wheezing and jigging and the little boys giggling and moving madly. We kick the boys out at 8 PM, the general curfew for kids to be out of the house; and though many protests and puppy-eyes are given, rules are rules!

Saturday night normally means fiesta time in Casa de los Mangos, especially when there’s visitors involved. Calzones are a party in my book, and though our oven runs out of gas and the dough is a bit under-cooked, they are delicious. We enjoye a bit of Toña, our favorite national beer (of the two available, which actually taste the same and are made by the same company) and sit around the dining room table chatting until Kate breaks the ice by painting on her best “Inigo Montoya” (of the Princess Bride) moustache and soul patch and sashaying into the room (much to the delight and surprise of our Nica friends). Soon we are all mustached and wrapped in gypsy scarves… a sort of Arab pirate themed troop of characters. When Steph oompa-loompas into the room with the most realistic goatee I have EVER seen I immediately drop to the floor and hold myself for a good minute to try to stop my bladder from the ultimate pants-peeing laughter. Osvaldo ends up as a spice-trader/karate-kid/zen master with a lovely curly moustache. Kate kindly makes me a little bit more feminine than last weekend (I was told my last weekend’s goatee made me look a bit too much like my little brother); I parade around for the night with a thin but chic moustache. Lauren gets the happy bushy intellectual eyebrows and a soul-patch that is the envy of any tattoo artist. Mike, the last and reluctant victim of the face painting parade, ends up looking like a dashing young Burt Reynolds. In fact I think he should grow out a thick moustache, the look suits him so. This face painting goes on for a few hours, over which I nearly pee my pants 5 times as and my mouth and stomach ache with broad smiles and belly laughter.

Sunday morning brings copious amounts of fruit salad- cantaloupe, watermelon, bananas, and pineapple- to be exact. Since our gas tank for the stove still reads E we have no coffee to lift my morning. As on many Sunday mornings, I end nap on the patio for nearly three hours after breakfast, soaking up the warmth of the sun-soaked bricks. Osvaldo whispers in my ear to wake me at 2 PM to go for a hike. We pass the school, where Magda’s giving a Sunday afternoon guitar lesson to Jeffery, the brilliant boy who makes any teacher’s work worthwhile. Soccer league games and adolescent boys fill the stadium. The older men watch and chew the fat on the sideline, their horses roped to a chain-link fence. Osvaldo takes me to Mano del Diablo, a beautiful cliff rock formation overlooking the valley below our mountaintop. We sit for a moment to marvel the view before taking a path over a barbed wire fence to explore some more giant boulders and crumbling cliff walls, winding scraggly trees reaching toward skies. We share exceptional moments discovering the twists and turns of the non-existent path, finally ending up at the local laguna. We decide to make a cup of coffee at Osvaldo’s house and I chat with his mother about the weather as we listen to Silvio Rodriguez and watch their chickens cluck their way across the packed-mud of the yard. Osvaldo jokes about the family’s “guard” dog “la Chelita” (the whitey) who was purchased for security but licks and loves anything walking. Osvaldo’s mom is absolutely shocked to learn that I take my coffee “amargo” (bitter: without a half-cup of sugar), and asks me if I think it will rain. Though it has not rained in months (since November), I feel the pressure of the sky- I do not know at this moment, but I sense the longing for rain in the Earth, that energy that passes between sky and earth in the moments before an exhalation of nature’s tears.

Osvaldo’s promised a visiting friend that he’ll play some folkloric guitar music, and since the guitar I have at the house has no chords (and I can’t find the three sets I bought in Managua last week) we end up walking around for an hour searching for a guitar to borrow- finally finding one a mere block from my house. I sit and marvel as his fingers work their way across the chords and let my eyes wander to the tips where electricity becomes melody and melody becomes passion. Finally Benjamin (a whole other story, an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who flat out gives me the creeps) leaves and Osvaldo and I gaze at the stars, whispering into the misty darkness until the first droplets fall. He leaves, for the up-teenth time and I catch a fistful of tears in my throat thinking about how he’s become a joyous part of my life...

Luckily I have Steph and Lauren to distract me. We eat dark chocolate and play cards until the wee hours of the morning, then lay in bed and yell at each other through the walls about the current stank which permeates our bedrooms. It’s a bit of a rotten fish smell, and we think it may be rats dying in the wall from some poison Facoundo sneakily placed there last week. He’s always hiding things in the rafters- I’ve found a slingshot, a bike chain, some large nails, a sandwich bag of beans, a boot, and the sole of a shoe, among other things stuck away to hide above normal sight-level.

I dream of powdery snow (though I do not miss winter) and wake with a rumbling unhappy stomach (something which happens consistently to me every couple of weeks for 24 hours), and gaze outside at the rising mist, ready to embrace a new day. Welcome to my weekend-time: kids running in and out in general chaos, music and laughter, face painting, gardening, sunshine soaking, a bit of feasting and fiesta-ing, talking about the weather, sunsets, family visits, hiking and exploring, cloud pondering, whispers, and above all else, la vida tranquila de Cusmapa.