ouch!!
i just cut my thumb wickedly out in the garden, where i've been working for hours. pulled some grass to clear the area around a purplish, mountainous borinda bamboo that a friend of nick dawson's brought us from taplejung district and some sliver of it went through my thumb & out again. ow! it was bleeding a lot before, but it's ok now. hurts, though...
it's about 6:30 pm on a saturday. my first day staying home in our compound in budhanilkantha all day since we came back to kathmandu ten days ago from the states. it's been a lovely day, fresh this morning, then drizzling & rainy all afternoon. quite overcast actually, with billowly clouds on the horizon against the southern hills behind koppan monastery. now that i'm inside, i can watch the clouds ('both sides now') while typing upstairs in out computer/tv room (for those of you who've been here...). as you can imagine, it's very, very lush during july in the himalaya. the monsoon.
there's also a peaceful view north of the forested, 7,000' ridge on shivapuri from where i'm sitting. a cluster of houses a thousand feet above us. my clothes are still damp and the temperature is dropping. yet, listen: the birds are giving their final chirps of the day -- goodbye day -- before darkness settles in...
just an hour ago, our little rivulet had a foot or more of water pouring down with the gutteral, gurgling sound of a mountain creek overflowing. i'm surprised the fish in the ponds are smart enough not to be washed away. while the duck floats contentedly paddling against the current...
like f. scott fitzgerald's famous image of our restless american souls at the end of 'gatsby'.. trying to capture the past that eludes us, always...
well, it's summer and south asian wet is always impressive, so there's tons of stuff growing, multiplying & creeping everywhere... leah doesn't even want to go in the garden because she knows that there are leeches back there. i usually end up sufering one bite a visit, no matter how many hours i'm out & about -- although sometimes i'm lucky & see the little black creature before it enjoys a liquid meal at my expense.
this afternoon i saw a globular hornet's nest hidden on the fence in the climbing roses along the road in the back. unexpected & strange, no doubt, but actually, quite lovely decorated with whirling brown, white and tan colors like europa or io or one of the oddly resplendent distant moons of jupiter. anita says when it gets much larger, the nest will have honey & we can smoke out the hornets. well, they can... i think i'll run for cover (with ms. leah) if someone wants to challenge a wasp's nest, even for homemade honey. no winnie-the-pooh me!
still, there's nothing like nature to keep the mind occupied, rested & observant. the colors and patterns. colors & patterns. no wonder hours slip away when i'm out back meandering, trimming, cleaning, cutting, carrying, standing or just staring.
as dame rebecca west said about the balkans before the second world war, wherever you found water moving, you'd find an old turkish man standing. i think i'm slowly becoming that old turkish man in the mountainous exurbs of kathmandu...
as the wise old penguins in the cartoon 'madagascar' say, 'just smile and wave; smile and wave'...
actually, since coming back, the garden's offered a few treats as we've had the pleasure of eating home grown corn on the cob, iceberg lettuce and sweet & sour licchis. the corn & lettuce, of couse, is seasonal, while most of our fruit trees were planted when we made the back gardens over the past 2-3 years; but everything comes up quickly here. although, coming to think of it, the fruiting licchi tree must be 5 years or so, since it's much bigger than the other licchi trees & it's the only feeding us now.
early the other morning when i was strolling out back before work, i counted about 20 orange, lemon & grapefruit trees . it'll be a literal orchard in a few years, if they stay healthy. there's one absolutely adorable young grafted orange sapling (only three feet high!) ladden with about 70 green fist-size oranges and another with nine fruits that look more like dark green xmas ornaments hanging above our pond.
then, there's leah's favorite: two cute reddish mangos on a three foot grafted sapling from siraha district down in the terai (near the indian border). the save staff brought it up to me a few years ago with the licchi saplings.
plus, there are scores of purplish guavas starting to grow from flowers, they're small, marble-size, but in a month or two will get as big as peaches. oh, yes, we've got some peach trees, too, but these are small nepali ones -- not the lush greek ones of our dreams. then, the little 'muntalas' are starting to pop up all over our one kumqat tree. there must be hundreds; but we'll have to wait a few months to enjoy them.
but the biggest surprise on coming back after five weeks away, however, are two chinese thorn bamboo shoots that must have pushed out of mother earth right before we returned. these 'babies' pushed out of the ground measuring 10" in circumference. wow! i'm not sure how tall they'll get, but i surely wasn't expecting such massive 'tusa' (as the nepalis say) from this bamboo. shakun found it, i believe, in a nursery when we were in phuket some four or five years ago. in the early years, you can tell the bamboo's age b/c each year the shoots get a bit larger. this chinese thorn bamboo (there are sharp thorns on the branches) has about four generations of shoots from the 2" circumference to the 3" circumference to the 5" circumference, then this 'mother of all circumferences.
of course, since it's monsoon, there's alot of new priapic bamboo shoots stretching skyward. the early varieties did their shooting in april/may, befoe we left, with the early rains -- but the later bamboo are starting their push about now.
we've a beautiful dendracalamus minor that i brought from a nursery near mom&dad's home in florida a few years ago that has seven exquisite shoots on the other side of the tea house pond. the new shoots have a dreamy, gray-green hue with faint yellow stripes on the stalks. the crown, when coming up out of the soil, has feathery, dark four inch leaves above the culm with short black hairs. they're quite serene & beautiful, as you can imagine.
like so much of life when young, tender, fresh & innocent...
worth standing and watching, too, just like the world-weary, turbaned turkish men many decades ago in the distant mountains of the balkans...
or berkshires or sierras or adirondacks or pyreenes or pocanos or olympias or rockies or jura or just in our own backyards...
good-bye, day!
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