tiny leaves, spittle, and spiders´s webs...my slow lifestyle here

Humming birds and happiness

Already full of fabulous, fond, and meaningful memories, the full-on six-day sibling shibboleth, a whistle-stop tour of places in Paraguay significant to us, and maybe us alone, is over.  Time now for recollections in tranquillity. So far, so good. In fact, terrific and treasured.

Brother John and sister Ruthie, joined by niece Jeanette, are continuing on a more touristic journey, while Andreas has gone back to work in Peru, and Luke on to his filmic quests in southern Paraguay and Argentina.

Meanwhile, I have made my way 500km back north (by bus and motor bike - ´Of course we can get your luggage on!´said the motorbike man. Óne bag on the tank, one on each knee, one on your back, and one in one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold on.´, so I did what I was told and it worked) to my little Paraguayan pad in Belen, a simple two-roomed house with stone floors, cool but plain kitchen, straw-thatched quincho (patio), soft-sand courtyard, and fruit-tree-filled garden, whose location is 250 metres from the sweet-flowing Rio Ypane.  At the moment only jacca fruit are ripe but mulberries have just finished and bananas and mango follow soon. As to the river, it beckons every day and says come out, cool down, and play.

Just now, while proper Paraguayans were mostly sleeping off their midday meal, I did, stroll down shirtless in shorts, to the river, jump in and swim, swim, swim.  The sky was blue, the temperature in high 30s, with a gentle breeze, and the world hereabouts appeared generally at ease with itself. On the grassy banks, Zebu cows and calves gently grazed, and a family of piriritas (yellow and brown magpie-like birds) chattered in the overhanging branches.

A few metres downstream, three boys laughed and played in the water, so utterly at home and at ease, diving from branches, splashing one another, happy as can be. Not far away, a man in the shade of a citrus tree was trying things out with his voice and guitar. The whole scene put me in mind of a poem by Anna Wickham, with lines something like this.

I heard two splendid simple sounds today//A mad man´s music and young boys at play.//The music was not good but soon, the old man took a fiddle in his hand and played to his high friend, the moon.// The boys were young and full of play.//I heard two splendid simple sounds today//A mad man´s music and young boys at play.

Back at the little house, which may now be called Casa Picaflor (Humming Bird House) there is a very special resident who is proving to be the star attraction, and providing great pics for some and hours of entertainment for others.  (Yes, I think I may have written about her before but she is quite simply a tiny STAR who merits more words.) On a single strand of straw that sticks out from the thatched roof of the kitchen quincho, a hummingbird (local Guarani name Maynumby Jeroky) has built its nest, of tiny leaves, spittle, and spiders´s webs.  Alongside my slow lifestyle here, this is one busy bird. She makes me look positively sluggish. Did you know that after mating, the female humming bird does everything alone, including nest-building, incubating eggs, and feeding young? Did you know that hummingbirds have been around for 65 million years, manage up to 80 wing beats per second, can alter their wing angle to fly backwards, flight muscles are up to 30% of their body weight, heart rate can be up to 1000 beats per minute, and Paraguayans reckon they bring sweetness  and good luck to a house? Here, I reckon this little beauty just spotted a rather nice empty casita de campo and thought, let´s move in, just as other fauna have, including flat wall-frogs, tiny lizards, giant moths, and a trillion termites.

So here I am, sitting shirtless in the shade of the vine arbour, planted last year but already bearing big bunches of grapes.  Ms Maynumby Jeroky, is sitting pretty on her nest, Mother Hen (part LSF stock) with her chicks is pecking at discarded watermelon, Rambo the neighbour´s dog is stretched out in the sand, the Jaguar-face leaves are drooping in the heat, and blue blossoms are falling from the tree with no name. You could say that it´s a pretty perfect Sunday afternoon.

And now, as the sun sits lower in the sky, I can see that the family of fifty spiders has come out of their nest of webbed jacca tree leaves. They are dropping to the ground on long threads, ready to build their giant triangular web that snares night´s insects and ends up being walked through by cattle in the morning.

Last night, in front of 3,000 people at the segunda Belen Festival de Paye, after an amazing sequence of dances by dancers dressed as gauchos and campesinas, the Holland siblings were mentioned in dispatches, not by me but by the MC, who described us as a bunch of honourable English folk who chose to come to Belen and ´honour us with their presence´. My response was to say that the honour was entirely ours, and gratitude too.

Today, I re-explored my secret Paraguayan garden and found a secret well.  Next step, to get down it and discover who knows what. Also cut some Inga tree branches that were shading the vine and damaging the quincho.

As you can see from this last bit of info, am in slow mo mode and am unlikely to have any exciting action to report.  Sorry. There is only so much swimming, sunning, and sandia (watermelon) I can heap on you, and other than my thoughts, best left where they are, there is little more to tell for now.

Hope all´s well with you, wherever you are, with or without a humming bird in your kitchen.

Hasta la proxima amigos y amigas.