Grief

Grief, I've decided, is like a giant fun house. Not fun, at all, just full of traps.
You're walking along and suddenly everything goes all stretchy and distorted, like one of those nightmares where sound becomes something from a monster movie and movement is no longer subject to the laws of time and space.
Oh, right, you realize. It's one of those wavy mirrors, that's all. Maybe an amplifier with all its knobs turned all the way up. You try to wake up, can't, and discover
this is no nightmare.

This is real.
She's really gone. She's really not coming back.

You clamp your hands over your ears to hide from the screams, but it doesn't work because they're coming from inside you.
So you bend every muscle to dragging your legs through the quicksand that seems to be holding them, and finally you can inch your way out of that particular section of the fun house.
For two minutes, you're better.

Then something jumps out and shrieks at you, and your heart tries to escape its cage of ribs. You throw your arms over your head, crying like a baby, but there's no Mama to comfort you, so the crying just goes on.
When it finally stops, you try to lift your head, which now weighs 200 pounds, mop up your face, and make a teeth-gritted dash through the first door you see.

Hurrah! You're on the porch! Out! There's sunshine! You take a deep breath
and your lungs seize up like an old car engine running without oil.
It was an illusion. You're not on the porch. There is no porch. There is no sunshine. It's the reflection of the flames, coming closer, coming to consume you.

I am not sure how long this goes on. Great loss first flung me into this sub-quantum Dali landscape almost a year ago. I thought I was getting close to the back door. I thought all I had to pass was the claustrophobic hallway, where the walls squeeze you until you can't breathe. And maybe the tightrope over the broken glass. I thought I would be out soon.

Wrong.
 There was a sudden atomic explosion and I time-warped right back to the beginning. Here we go again. Familiarity is not a help. It increases the horror. I know what's around that bend.

I'm not going. You can't make me.

Okay, Just One. Or Two.

Had to show you Captain Poly of the Miss Poly, best and cleanest glass-bottomed boat in the Caribbean. And just a couple of blurry coral pix. . .Cool huh? You just WISH you'd been there!

Good-bye, Jamaica, how can you survive without us?!

More Good-bye

A view of the beach, and our Fearless Leader, still leaning forward on high alert even in her beach chair. She kept counting people. "Has anyone seen Hamrick?" (The correct answer, of course, was "Hamrick who?")

Montego Bay

What can I say? I have pictures of every room of the two bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, full kitchen, dining room, living room and seaview balcony hotel suite! Which put up 4-5 of us and cost something in the neighborhood of US$60-80!! I have a jillion pix of turquoise waves, and a jillion more of blurry coral taken through the glass-bottomed boat. The bottom line is, we had a blast on that last day! Some snorkeled for hours, breathless with excitement about eels and puffers and brain coral and sea fans. Some swam and floated and sunned. Some sat in beach chairs or dozed on towels. Six of us went on a memorable glass-bottomed boat tour. It wasn't ALL work in Jamaica! Oh, and that awesome view is the bay, showing the dark coral reefs, as seen from the pedestrian walkway from our hotel to the beach access.

Good-bye

Eventually, as fires do, the bonfire burned low. For the last time, we went to bed in our bunks, all packed up for the trip to Montego Bay.

Our Last Night On the CSI Farm, Part Two

There's something about sitting quietly together around a fire, watching sparks fly up into a darkening sky, Orion and the Big Dipper swinging silently by overhead. We debated mildly about whether those two planets that have been hanging together for weeks now are Venus and Mars, Venus and Jupiter, some other thing entirely? (Does anybody actually know? Inquiring minds would love the true answer!)

We talked about what we'd seen, what we'd learned, what we'd done or wished we had done. We laughed or amened or maybe got a little tearful, as seemed called for.

We talked of coming back. But ultimately, we said good-bye. And thank you. They thanked us, but I do believe we were blessed more.

Our Last Night On the CSI Farm, Part One

They have a really awesome fire pit, all lined with big stones, and someone, I don't know who, had prepared a really Boy Scoutly teepee bonfire. After supper on Friday, we were sent out, carrying our chairs, to sit by the brightly burning fire and to answer, each for ourselves, two brightly burning questions:

What did the week mean to you?

What are you going to do about it?

Last Night at the CSI Farm

They have a really awesome fire pit, all lined with big stones, and someone, I don't know who, had prepared a really Boy Scoutly teepee bonfire. After supper on Friday, we were sent out, carrying our chairs, to sit by the brightly burning fire and to answer, each for ourselves, two brightly burning questions:

What did the week mean to you?

What are you going to do about it?

For Our Sins, Work on the Hard Rock Pile!

I forgot to show you what we did instead of finishing the greenhouse. Actually, there were several jobs passed around. I'm not sure what all of them were. Some had to start digging a new foundation hole next to this house, but I don't have pictures, more's the pity, of them slaving to dig out the most amazingly heavy clay you ever tried to muck out of the ground! Chris McKenzie said it well: "This stuff is glue!"

Several of us, though, were set to moving this pile of gravel inside the house and spreading it around evenly, in preparation for pouring concrete floors. It involved wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of gravel, many cooperative shovels, a square shovel (and boots) for shoving it all around neatly inside, and more muscle and sweat than we thought we had left at the end of the week!

Cameron's Turmeric

Last but not least, one of several bags of turmeric, which we thought looked like large grubs!

Cameron's Turmeric

Last but not least, a bag of turmeric roots, which we thought looked kind of like large grubs!

Cameron's Scotch Bonnet Peppers

Here is a picture of one of his pepper fields, and a close-up of a pepper. It's not quite mature yet--it will have the look of a Scotch bonnet, kind of like a miniature Turk's Turban squash, if you know what that looks like. (Having trouble with uploading pictures.)

Cameron's Cocoa Tree

Here is a picture of a cocoa tree (more properly a Cacao tree). You can see the pods hanging directly off the trunk and branches. Yellow is good, black is bad, and you can also see rat holes if you look closely.

Cameron's Cocoa Tree

Here is a picture of a cocoa tree (more properly a Cacao tree). You can see the pods hanging directly off the trunk and branches. Yellow is good, black is bad, and you can also see rat holes.

Cameron's Farm

Cameron is a young man who lives nearby and is a friend of CSI. He was educated in the states and has gone back home to Jamaica to try to revive his old family farm and give employment to as many people in his economically depressed parish as possible. We were all pretty much awestruck at all he's accomplished already. His main products so far are little yellow Scotch Bonnet peppers (innocent-looking--don't trust them!HOT!!!), and turmeric, the things in the white bag that look kind of like large grubs. He also has a "cocoa walk" (what you call a plantation of cocoa trees) but has trouble with rot, which blackens the pods, rats, which eat into them, and the need of processing. He said at one point you were required to sell all your cocoa powder only to the government, for $8/lb, and they turned around and resold it for $64. Now, if he can build his own processing building, which sounds fairly doable, he can employ more workers and sell the powder for more. (I told him I'd buy it!)

This is a picture of Cameron's farmhouse.

Cameron's Farm

One of the men who came to visit was Cameron, who was educated in the states and has come back to Jamaica to revive his family's farm and do his best to employ some people and help his economically depressed parish. The work he is doing left us all pretty awestruck, and he was like a sponge when it came to any new information and ideas we could offer for ways to create value-added products that will help him to be as financially stable as possible. He took us on a tour of his farm, where his main products at the moment are Scotch Bonnet peppers (HOT!!) and turmeric. He has an old "cocoa walk" (what you call a plantation of cocoa trees) but has trouble with rats eating the pods, which is why you see the black. You can also see holes chewed in. He can't poison rats and also stay organic, so that's something he's researching.

More Greenhouse Progress

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to this. Here are some pictures of the greenhouse as near complete as we got it. We were unable to completely finish it, because parts for the gutters didn't arrive in time. So our crew chief, Patrick, gave us different work to do, which will be the subject of the next post.

The first picture shows half the plastic up--that's the bit that was put up in the wind a couple of posts ago.

The others show views from inside and outside, once the plastic is on both halves of the roof. You can see the open area between the two roof sides. One side is wider (which is why the plastic wouldn't reach) and overhangs the other to protect from rain inside, but there is an area about 2" wide that's left open for ventilation.

I should add that I don't know why there's a second copy of one of the pictures, nicely done in blue! Apparently I can't delete just one picture, which seems stupid, but what do I know?

More Greenhouse Progress

Sorry it's taken me awhile to get back to this! Here are some more pictures of the almost-completed greenhouse. We couldn't completely finish it, since the parts needed for gutters didn't arrive in time. So they gave us other work to do, which will be the subject of the next post.

Pretty Stuff

Greenhouse Progress

By Wednesday the frame was complete on the greenhouse, and we began to put up the plastic. It was windy, with some fairly powerful gusts. Unfortunately I missed the shot when the plastic, having been pulled all the way along the top, billowed up and tried to act as a sail to take the entire island on a Caribbean cruise, but you can see where the plastic is pushing against the ladder in this picture.

Once it was pulled carefully all the way along the top, it turned out to be too narrow, much to everyone's disappointment. (It was donated, and you can't look a gift horse in the mouth.) Unlike us impatient Americans, the Jamaicans simply shrugged and said, "Throw it down and turn it--we'll put it crosswise instead."