Interlude & Lights

I like to wake up just before dawn and sit quietly before a candle, with my dulcimer tuned to a simple drone.

As the dawn slowly lightens the sky and makes visible the fiery red bugambilia (Spanish for bougainevillea), I tune my voice to the lowest note I can hold, and slowly work up and down the scale, a little higher every few minutes. In the end, I have two clean octaves, and start singing those songs I have loved and carried with me since I lived in the foothills of the Himalayas more than half a lifetime ago.

The birds dance all around my voice, and an occasional cow sets a new bass note. A chorus of roosters sets a scale that travels from our far end of the village all the way to the other end, and back again. A timpany of dog barks sets in now and again. Accents of Spanish float by...

Quite often, this marvelous reverie is brought abruptly to a halt with a leap from a feisty kitten... although today, Cheneke (prounounced "cha-NAY-kay") crept up quietly onto the upturned edge of the dulcimer and settled down above my rhythmic fingers and watched, head to one side for quite some time before biting them.

The effect of that bite was much the same as my adding this byte to my prose:
Hey man! We are WIRED!
Yesterday it was beastly hot and no waves. Sun directly overhead. We were plotting an escape to a waterfall when Guillermo (the town mayor and dear dear friend) ambled by to tell us that the electricity guys were in the village. He worked it out with them to wire us up right then. Told THEM we were renting from him, because they would not have wired up foreigners just like that--more paperwork for gringos. Lucky us. Robert had already poured two tall cement posts and bought all the accoutrements and we were READY!

He was out there for hours, WITH those guys, hooking up all the boxes, and cable and whatever --with a sun directly overhead. I was in the shade, ready to hop up and get whatever he needed.

So today we´re in town getting the mundane stuff to use the electricity which IS running through our cables as I type. Tonight we will have a light bulb over our campstove, and we can even have our very own home'made carrot-beet juice! Next time down, we´ll buy a refrigerator and we can have, um, ice cream.....

BIG SWELL due in on Sunday! Grab your boards.