Back in
October Lázaro Solís, the gardener at Tami and Karen’s house that we had rented
for two winters, agreed to give us one day a week at the Casa DaviLinda, and
for nearly three months he did. We planted flowers both behind and in front of
the casita. We trimmed dead wood and put in the row of coffee plants.
We sited and he dug the compost pits for kitchen organic
waste and garden detritus. We began talking about the big, bare, front slope.
And then he got a stomachache, and it got worse, and by Christmas he was
getting ready for an operation that it turned out for medical reasons could not
be done until late March. With a projected 4-month recovery. The surgery went
well, and the recovery too, and in late June he began to resume light duty with
the town of Santa Cruz. In December Lázaro had been named first alcalde, one of the village’s top
officials, the man in charge of all of the deslindes
that are crucial for buying, selling, and resolving disputes over real property.
We told
Lázaro that we were planning on 2 days per week over the long term, that he
could have them if he wanted, or he could split with someone else (as he does
at Tami and Karen’s) and would he recommend someone in the interim between now
and when he could start. He designated Laurentino Jiménez, the teniente alcalde, a gentle man in his
early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a sweet smile, who lives up the
road above the Santa Cruz agencia
building. Lauro’s cargo with the
town, like all such, is not remunerated, and he was delighted to have the work,
so much so that when we suggested full time for a couple of weeks, his smile
got wider. The two weeks turned into four, the smile into a broad grin.
Linda is
Lead-Shovel on the garden projects, and she has run with the office like you
wouldn’t believe! Trips, plural, to every vivero
(nursery) that can be reached on a single tanks of gas: San Lorenzo; Santa
Cruz; the stretch of road to el Tule; Chantal’s place (a French lady who lives
a couple of lomas over). Books on southwest desert plants (only Latin names; of
negligible use in the nurseries in Oaxaca). Back to the nurseries anyway, to
try to match small pots to the books’ glossy photos.
Lauro has
been our Mr. Greenjeans. He knows a lot about local plants and lot of their
names, though terminology in the Etla hills does not match either the Latin
names in the books or the vivero
names in the valley. Lauro knows which plant’s roots go deep, which go broad, which
are always thirsty, and which—like chicory up north—thrive on neglect in the
compacted stony edges of the access roads. For some of the flowering plants a
little sun is essential, and a lot of sun is fatal. To shade the ones that
happen to have rooted in sunny spots, he has built little awnings out of carrizo canes and fronds. He has also
constructed little cages for over the pots where we are growing seedlings; at
night we cover them with canes and fronds. Then if we happen to get a driving
rain at night or—even worse—a hailstorm, they will be protected.

Lauro does
the heavy work. Constructing the stairs. Digging the hole to plant a new tree
(like the hole the dumb lizzards fell into). Laying rocks in the ríos secos. Carrying the bags of
fertilizer (@ 25 kilos) from the car to the garden bodega. He also always seems to go the extra kilometer. Though his
workday is from 8:30 to 5:00, he always works until a little past five, and
only then begins to gather up the garden tools for night storage in the bodega,
The last
couple of weeks we’ve been plagued by arrieras
(the leaf-cutter ants we hunted a couple of nights) that have attacked several
of our fruit saplings (who still dream of becoming trees) and our showiest hill
flowers. So Lauro has come back in the
evening, around 9:00, on his own time.
“No, please don’t bother; Linda and I
can do it.”
“Well,
maybe I won’t come. You know what to look for.”
But then, at 9:00, there he is to hunt with us by
flashlight. Together we scope out the parades, determine in which direction the
porter ants are carrying their leaf bits, and follow them back to the nests. Arrieras are tricky little gangsters:
they hide their holes during the daytime and only open them up at night; and
though sometimes they’ll pile up their tunnel dirt to make an anthill on a road
or on a clear patch of field, they really like to construct their entrances in
the thickest clumps of weeds. Preferably ones with thorns. And they scatter
their tunnel dirt so as to leave no obvious clues to what they are doing. We
have a cousin, P’nina, whose earliest memory is doing that in a British
concentration camp on Cyprus in 1946, every morning hiding the dirt from the
escape tunnels that the men were digging at night, all of them waiting for
clearance to go to Palestine.
But the
ants are not refugees. Linda carries a yoghurt carton of folidol power and a throwaway plastic spoon. When we find a hole,
we douse it with the insecticide and pound a stake into the ground next to it.
The next day we come back to the stakes with a shovel and dig up the center of
the hole. More folidol powder.
Yesterday one of the holes surprised us with a clutch of four lizard eggs,
buried near the surface so that the heat of the day would warm them. They must
have been nearly ready, for as Lauro got them up on his shovel, one of them
split open and revealed a lizard fetus. It and the other three eggs we
reburied.
So, where
are we? The casita is surrounded by
fruit trees, herbs, coffee plants, wandering Jew and citronella.
Along the east fence the cactus garden appears to be well
settled and is beginning to show a little growth. The trees along the west
fence are leafing out. The fruit trees down by the portón chico (little gate)
are wimpy but beginning to make a recovery from the last attack of arrieras. The terrace of flowering
plants at the top of the hill, in front of the porch of the casa are thriving. The area where the construction
workers used to take their afternoon break with watermelon and cantaloupe, amusing
themselves with contests to see who could ptooey the seeds furthest, has
developed into a nice melon patch. An assortment of terracotta pots are hosting
flowers on the porches and window ledges.

We’ve
survived one major storm. A black cloud came in over the mountains from the
southeast. Thunder crackled, lightning flashed all around, the wind wailed
across the chimney, bent many of the bushes double, and blew our brooms from
the back porch across almost to the bodega. From one moment to the next the
temperature dropped eight or ten degrees centigrade. A few harbinger raindrops
pummeled the porch tile, bouncing and splashing like water balloons, and then
the sluice gates opened. The rain came down so hard that we could not see more
than four or five meters. It drove nearly horizontal from
the southeast, and sent rivulets under the dining room doors. The rain chains
Niagara’ed the flow from the tile roof into the catchment basins. The ríos secos ran like whitewater brooks.
Then the drumming tattoo of rain plunking on our tile roof and the tin roof of
the bodega turned to the rattle of battle drums. Hail! White, thumb-nail size
pellets, bouncing on the grass, piling up on the mulch mound at the end of the
terrace, cracking and splintering on the tile patio.
And in ten minutes it was over. The wind died. The cloud
went west. The sun came out. The ice melted. And a mop took care of the dining
room floor.
We’ve made
a start. We’ve reached a fragile plateau where all it will take is constant
work to keep the arrieras at bay, to
make sure that the dirt stays here and the water goes there, that the trees are
kept free of parasitic interlopers, and to keep abreast of which weed-like
plants are vigorously invasive nutrient thieves, and which—if left alone for a
couple of weeks—will reward our clemency by putting out beautiful flowers. If
the pace of maintenance permits some moments for innovations, we will replace
the failures, add new things to the sparse patches, and keep trying to insure
that the array of trees and bushes, and flowers are timed to attract birds and
butterflies 52-weeks a year.
But for
now, as I write this, I am happy just to sit on the porch of the casa, with my
coffee cup on the table next to the computer, gazing out over the gardens, over
the pasture across the Calle Independencia where an ox is grazing
placidly—today must not be a plowing day—and at Atzompa and Monte Albán across
the valley. It will do.