Hanging out in the Garden

The sky is blue, the sun in bright, and there’s a nice little breeze blowing. Yesterday the wind was blowing really hard, and I had to put everything away on the teraza. Stuff was blowing all over the place. But this morning the weather is perfect.

After tidying up from the windstorm last night, I ate breakfast. Then I flagged down the water truck guy (five gallon blue plastic jugs), carried the trash bag down to the street to the trash truck, put my “Coke” chair out on the side of the road, so the Coke truck would and sell me Cokes.

I cleaned up the trash my landlord throws on the side of the house, and watered my plants. My landlady came up from the restaurant, and we picked chilis from her plants. She me one of the water plants with blue flowers, and we planted it in a water slurry of dirt and water.

My landlord, 76 years old.

A young man who was supervising some guys “cleaning” a hillside lot across the road from this house can over to buy a Coke. I explained my “Coke” sign was so the Coke truck would stop and sell ME some Cokes.

It turned out he had lived in Central California for years, spoke English, has an English-speaking wife and lives nearby, in La Penita. He invested his U.S. earning in property around this area and seemed to be doing okay financially. I got nervous that he would try to buy my landladies lot. But she make it clear to him she wasn’t selling, even though he hadn’t brought up the idea. Or, at least, I don’t think he had said anything about buying. Who knows.

I watered everything from the trash can, and "planted" a water hyacinth my landlady gave me. And then weeded and tidied up my pots/masetas.

Gustavo, the young man, had been stung by a wasp from the “cleaning”. He asked my landlord, who who has been on a tequila binge for three days, if he wanted to work. My landlord said that there were wasps down there and he wouldn’t go near that lot. But he did teach the young man, Gustavo, how to sharpen his machete.

It ended up Gustavo’s wife, and niece arrived to pick him up, because he couldn’t see well enough to drive. His wasp bite had swollen his eye closed. So my landlady, landlord, Gustavo and his family, and I sat around talking half the morning. I was waiting for the town water, and the trash truck, and the Coke truck. And they were passing time while their worker cleaned the hillside. And my landlord was maintaining his level of enebriation via Tequilla and orange juice.

Gustavo has worked in the restaurant business in California, and has lots of ideas about how to bring the good lifestyle things to Mexico without destroying Mexico. Good luck.

He seemed pretty saavy politically, about Mexico. He doesn’t’ think the rich Spanish families who have ruled Mexico for so long will ever let go of their stranglehold on Mexican business and politics. He thinks it would take a revolution, but the educational system here is so poor it will never happen. Who knows? Oaxaca is exploding as we speak.I started fooling around with the water line, and finally replaced the split section. I have been waiting all morning for the town water to go on, so I can fill the tinaco on the roof, and check the new line. Yesterday my enebriated landlord or his son left the toilet running in their bathroom and emptied the tinacho on the roof yesterday. This happens constantly. I always find little pieces or plastic or paper holding the flapper open in the toilet, so I assume it’s delibrate. Who knows?
Julio, the guy that turns the town water off and on, walked by a while ago with his mother-in-law, Tina, the orange juice lady. He said the water would be on in an hour. But that was two hours ago. Oh well.