Years ago when John and I moved to Saint Petersburg, my demi-sister Michele made a wonderful comment to John that I've never forgotten.
"When you move to the tropics its a matter of drawing a line between you and nature."
So true.
I would be lying if I said living on a tropical island is not paradise. 80 degree weather year-round, lush foliage, stunning skies, balmy breezes; its all part of a lifestyle to be envied. And then there's that other side lurking just outside the door. The jungle!!!
Yes. We live 18 minutes from a city of 1.2 million people and yes-- we live in a jungle. And it never ceases to remind you of that fact every minute of every day.
The first time I went to Panama on a TAD, I was smoking a cigarette on a break and I asked my colleagues what that that "crunching" sound was that seemed to come from the darkness around us (it sounded like crinkling cellophane).
"Oh-- that's just the jungle growing," they said with a laugh. Of course I assumed they were hazing me (this being a common thing to do in the Navy with someone on TAD) until I did a little research. It seems the Pan American Highway south of Panama was never finished because the segment through Columbia is in a jungle so dense, that grows so quickly, the effort was finally abandoned as unfeasible.
From my own perspective, I agree. Keeping ahead of the jungle here at Casa Clara Vista is a daily event.
Vines are my enemy here. The pictures above and below represent the amount of pruning involved after just ONE week. When we moved here, it took me two weeks to find the driveway and the walls beside it. I pull seedlings out of the pavement every morning and by lunch they are back-- just laughing at me to pull them again. And since I am not a fan of herbicides, they know they have the advantage.
But the jungle comes inside as well. I am forever cutting pathos vines that have crept in overnight through the windows above our bed, and into the dining area of the cottage apartment downstairs. I left a garden hose hanging off the balcony to drain one week, and forgot about it for two days. I was reminded when I went out to water a flowerpot on the balcony and noticed a vine had wound its way 9 feet up the hose and was peaking over the rail. It took me fifteen minutes to get the vine unwound from the hose.
And lest we think its merely a matter of flora, know that fauna is also quite at home inside the house. Cali (we named the coqui tree frog who lives in our sink drain) is so tame, I tell her when I'm going to start washing dishes and invariably she will move to high ground to watch my progress (she HATES soap suds). We have green and brown anoles who live in the lanai and atrium, blue anoles in the gardens, a five-foot iguana in the breadfruit tree, bats in the evening, spiders at night and last evening a horse wandered down the driveway into the forecourt (we hadn't closed the gate yet) and casually perused the situation before leaving on his or her own.
And why do we stand these intrusions into the sanctity of our home and gardens? Well, Puertoricans consider a coqui in the house as good luck and it is. They eat several times their weight in insects every day (same for the anoles, bats and spiders). I would dread to think how many ants and mosquitoes we would have without our scaled and furred friends holding the line. Because as Michele noted many years ago, living in the tropics is drawing a line between you and nature. I guess some of that nature didn't get the message in quite the same way.
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