Lauraceae

So yesterday I finished with the sanding. Julí advised me, later in the night, that I could use the whole sheet of sandpaper instead of tearing off bits. I tried it, and it worked much better. More experimenting! :-)

There was more cleaning to do than I so naïvely thought on Sunday. Well, that´s okay. I finished yesterday and started drawing the designs for some new plants today, namely jengibre, canela, and carambola. I hope it won´t take me too long to do them. It´s interesting: I always think it will take a long time when I am beginning a new sign, because it is so hard to get all the intricate details down within a plant. I am reinventing the wheel every single time I draw or paint a new sign. It is the same experience I had in Ethnobotany class when I drew the 25 separate family - each one took hours!

On Monday, after much confused running around, we all got together and went to San Vito to celebrate Karie´s last night in town. We went to Café Liliana´s (all of us minus Jack - Didier, Karie, Amanda, Sara, Julieta, Inés, and I) and randomly met Alexis and Julienne there. We had a great time that night; Alexis treated us (perhaps with Coopepueblos funds?) and afterwards we went to a club to go dancing. ¨Gasolina¨ came on, much to my glee. While we were schmoozing, I wrote a letter to Ruben for Karie to deliver. I started one for Sarah Wheatley as well but did not finish it in time. Ah well ...por correo, supongo.

I spent most of yesterday at home with the family. William and Marvín were working on the understory area of the guayabas. We cleared the leaves out from around some of the smaller plants, broke down fallen branches into smaller sticks, and raked the obono (compost) everywhere. There was a pile of wood, half-buried in mud and leaves, and I set to work sorting and laying the wood down in a neat pile. There were roaches in the pile, beautiful insects with red coats and long orichalcum-red legs... I decided that now would be a good time to combat my longtime avoidance of them. Using the rake, I used my Aikido practice to raise the pieces of wood up and grab them, so I would be able to see the roaches underneath from a distance. The roaches ran about, and I began to admire them. Those, particularly, were lovelier than the darker brown ones. I was thrilled.

¨The most meditative thing you can do is sort out a wood pile ...especially if you´re afraid of cockroaches.¨

Marvín saw me playing with the rake later and began chopping small pieces of wood with his bare hands! I asked him if he knew martial arts, and he laughed. William told me it was out of pure boldness, not any training. I was impressed.

Today, I encountered again the long family debate about whether or not the tree was cinnamon or cloves. I took one of the leaves and tasted it - the taste reminded me of something, but I could not remember what. The Ethnobotany text listed cinnamon as belonging to the family Lauraceae (which I remembered), whereas cloves belongs to Myrtaceae. Unfortunately the tree has no flowers, so it is down to leaves alone that the diagnostic must be made. The book also said that the ´cinnamon´ quills to which most of us are accustomed are usually Cassia quills, another member of the genus Cinnamomum. Both have permission to be sold as Cinnamon - true cinnamon has a more delicate flavor and lighter, thinner bark. I looked at the picture of the cinnamon plant, and at the picture on the next page of the cloves. Here... the leaves of the cinnamon plant have veins that run parallel to the main vein ...whereas the cloves only have perpendicular on the leaf... I´ve got it. I looked up the two families in the Ethnobotany lab manual, only to find the descriptions of the foliage nearly identical: ¨simple entire leaves, usually aromatic...¨ Then I realized: that taste I had experienced earlier, from the leaf ...reminded me of a Bay-Laurel tree. Of course. Lauraceae.

I harvested more leaves to make tea for later and told my family about this exciting discovery.