Moving from Simsbury, Connecticut to Uruguay in 2011 offered an opportunity to experience a new continent and new culture. Montevideo is a small city compared to the booming Buenos Aires just across the Rio de la Plata. Beyond the city limits are flat plains of grazing beef cattle, sheep and small independent farms. Uruguay is the bottom of the world. The Southern Hemisphere, and, yes, the water spins differently down the drain. My small cottage two blocks from the Rambla was surrounded by nature.
Pica Flora
Emily used the metaphor of a mail train from Tunis, but to me they are light iridescent clockwork toys dodging, dipping, stopping, sipping, blurred in motion.
The jasmine vine is dense and winds through the curved bars of my window, The blooms are opened and spill a heady scent into the air like a siren’s call to these nimble voyagers.
First there is one – then wait – another, or is it a third? A flash of rose and blue with a streak of green and yellow. The jet-bead eyes and delicate rounded face punctuated by the epee, fine-pointed long needle –
the straw that draws sweet nectar in a second before moving on to another and then another glorious fleeting distraction and a miracle of movement, efficiency and grace.
The whirring is audible; the vision ethereal.
Suddenly they are gone.
The southern summer sun bakes the terrace stones and the shade under the lintel of my bay window retreats.
After four years, I returned to the United States and although I had no real home or roots there, it became a place to rest, to write and to rediscover a different lost continent after thirty five years of teaching all over the world.
