First Month

And time does not stand still.
In reality, there is no difference between day 30 and day 21.47. The cosmos doesn’t seem to prefer exact numbers. There’s PI to remind us. What if instead of 10 fingers, we mammals had 8 on each hand? Would we be octomals instead of decimals? A useless reflection… and on August 15, true to our human habit, we celebrate our first month at Babylon Gardens!
It deserves a review, a balance perhaps. Of all the impressions I have had, which ones do I keep?
And immediately, without hesitation, the one that stands out the most, the rain. Because it rains here, it rains a lot. On a theoretical level we already knew that. On a certain occasion we searched and found that in the world ranking (UPS, another human mania!!), we are sixth. Something like 3,000 millimeters per year on average. Colombia, the champion, enjoys 3,240 millimeters. At some point, some wise man baptized this ecosystem as: “tropical rainforest”. Very accurate!
However, it is one thing to “know it” and another to “live it”. Probably in the future this will be a topic in this blog. Water is present in EVERYTHING. For now, I will highlight that the work gets complicated with mud. A lot. I will say that clothes don’t dry, and getting dressed in the wee hours of the morning in wet clothes… you probably already know that. So, the goal of a solar drying area, covered in translucent plastic to keep the water at bay, goes up several notches in the construction schedule. And I’m back to mud, because you may have missed it. Imagine it on your footwear, on every tool and every object you handle. First it’s the gloves. When it is no longer possible to grab anything, because everything slips, I take them off and use my hands. When they don’t work either, I wipe them on my pants. And when the trousers are already saturated… what do I do, take them off and look for another one? Anyway, we have to get used to it.
The good news is that it usually stops raining around 10 p.m. until noon the next day. So, we work early: 04:30 reveille, frugal breakfast, and at 05:30 we start activities (sunrise around 05:00). A couple of hours of hot sun that would like to dry puddles and harden my friend the mud, and already the clouds return in spectacular cascade from the peaks to the east. And so, every day of this first great month in Babylon.
Second, very briefly, I will mention the temperature. It is pleasant. We were surprised. We are only 700 meters above sea level, and at that altitude in other areas of the country, we have suffered a lot of heat. Here, however, I have to admit that a microclimate works: the nights are quite cold (you will look for sweaters and blankets, you will see), and on the other hand the day is perfect. We will have the opportunity later to find the explanation for this phenomenon. But in the meantime, it works like with grandmothers, they all have the smartest grandchild in the world. So, in Babylon we have the most comfortable microclimate in the world.
And thirdly, and I’ll end now so as not to tire you, I’ll mention our friends the toucans. We did not expect such a profusion of them either. From our ignorance we have only identified two species, a very large one and a smaller one (…obvious), but either there are many of them, or the ones we have are always around us. I have never seen them singing, but they are always heard around. The overabundance of toucans is good news, not only because of their extraordinary singular beauty, but particularly because of their fondness for the chicks and eggs of other birds, which will indirectly protect our plantations. The overabundance of toucans is also bad news: their fondness for fruit is legendary!!!
As you can see, this will be great fun…