feeling domestic

I think I’m feeling settled. I hesitate in saying it – I’ve been very wrong before countless times over – but I feel quite at home. Not borrowed, not visiting, not living on the surface, but actually stable. It feels good. Yet I’m still tentative. I was in San Jose at the weekend and I bought stuff ‘for the house’ – a few plates and bowls and chopsticks so I could return the awful plastic ones I borrowed from kindergarten. I suddenly have nice things. I feel like the time I leave this place will be the time I leave Costa Rica. Ooh, that feels strange and nice. This is my home. Perhaps if I keep saying it it will be. I made a vegetable garden yesterday. I cleared a corner of my space – a lovely sunny corner and mulched and composted it. It looks good. The soil here is very poor, all the life is in the leaf litter. This is I guess the same everywhere, but here it is very noticeable – under the 4 or 5 inches of leaf litter there’s heavy thick gray clay. To find garden soil one must look for rotting wood. There’s a huge tree stump behind the house in the jungle, armed with my trusty machete I clambered in there and hauled out 6 barrow loads of the most beautiful compost full of mycelium and earthworms. I have ginger and tumeric ready to plant out and cilantro and yams. I’d like some beans and pumpkin. The ground is too wet I think for root vegetables, even though my garden is all raised, hugelkulture style. I can make a taro and a yucca bed.