Here’s my friend Josefina and her helper – early morning sweepers.
This morning, bright and early, we drove our new red tractor to the llantero, tire guy, about 3/4 of a mile from here. Since we’re going to use it starting tomorrow (already!) we had to get the tires filled – get this – with water. Water. I didn’t have a clue.
We backed the tractor out of our garage, and started up the street to the carretera, the highway that’s in the process of being reconstructed. On the gravelly, dusty highway, we made our tractorly way to the tire repair guy, Pancho. He repairs and fills all kinds of tires, and is an pleasant guy. We got to his shop and sat there for awhile as he began.
A woman we know passed by, carrying sacks full of plastic bottles to recycle. She used to come to our house every couple of weeks to pick up the bottles we save for her, but she hadn’t come lately, and we had several fertilizer sacks full of bottles. They had been there so long the sacks had begun to deteriorate.
As it so often happens, and as it turned out, she is the aunt of a neighbor woman. In these small ranchos, nearly everyone has relatives in the surrounding ones. We often see her trundling by on the highway, carrying bags of plastic bottles to sell to the recyclers.
There’s a very small hardware store very to close to the tire repair place, and we walked over there to get a couple of things for the tractor. We needed a new what’s-it-called, thingy to drop through the holes to hook the disc to the tractor. when we received our tractor, the holes weren’t properly aligned to do the hook-up,
and we needed to either enlarge the holes or get a smaller thing to drop in there. And one of the nipples for greasing had broken off, so we bought a new one of those. The hardware store had all sorts of things to keep me looking, as do many hardware stores: nest boxes for parakeets, fish hooks in two sizes, rope, and fiddly little things necessary to keep your house running well.
Next to the hole-in-the-wall hardware store was a restaurant that serves seafood, and we had resolved to spend our hour-and-a-half there to have some breakfast. There was one thing on the menu – shrimp cocktail. We ordered a large one to split between us, and it was excellent! I watched as the owner prepared it for us. In the kind of tall glasses with large bases you’d expect, he started with about a half-cup of water (shrimp water?) he dipped out of a plastic bowl. Then he added the shrimp, and as I watched he chopped up onion, then tomatoes, and then avocados. He poured a red liquid over the top (probably Kermato or Clamato, maybe with some sweetener added). And then, voila! he brought them to the table and opened a cardboard box of Saltines, called Saladitas here. It was excellent, and a wonderful breakfast. It cost less than six dollars for the two of us.
The tire man finished filling the tires with water, and we headed for home on the dusty, bumpy highway. Once there, we parked the tractor behind the house and started filling the big water tank in the back of our pickup so we can dump water in the bottom of a narrow ditch our workers have been cleaning. It’s been so hot and dry that it required pick-axes to break the surface of the ground in the dry ditch.
And then, the señora showed up to get the bottles, so we helped to re-bag them in newer plastic sacks. This is the first time I’ve seen 100-lb bags that are a green color. They deteriorate rapidly in the sun. Farmers use these sacks by the hundreds and thousands, so it’s a wonderful thing that they are clearly biodegradable. This woman is a widow, and supports herself by picking up bottles along the highway. She walks several miles every day.
We had six or seven sacks to fill with the plastic bottles. We have a few bottles that we buy ourselves because we purchase Coke-a-Cola to serve to visitors (that’s about all they care for), and I pick up bottles whenever possible while we’re working.