Karin had been planting arugula stalks in the swampy water.
I thought many looked they were past gone but she said, “No! Even the dried reedy bark ones are good.”
Read moreI didn’t like planting arugula myself as I had the wrong shoes for the grey swamp water, green espadrilles which let the water seep in. Ted’s shoes were better, they were also green but made of leather but he too didn’t like planting the thin reedy stalks. Only Karin was good at it.
We sat at the back of FG’s tenement building on a brick walled platform that overlooked the alley in the back. It was the three of us there, plus a local Costa Rican boy.
Karin and Ted sat quite close, their legs intertwined. Karin put a blue blanket over them and she rubbed his legs, partly to keep him warm, but maybe to do more. It made me jealous. Then she pulled a green corrugated aluminum canopy over Ted and herself so that me and the Costa Rican boy couldn’t see them at all.
The boy must have been jealous as well, because he tried to slide under the canopy to join them, before Karin interjected and made a loud noise, before she and Ted slid out from under the aluminum canopy then jumped down into the alley and ran away.
The boy ran after them, but when he jumped down from the wall, and landed in what he thought was a straw pile, it turned out that Karin had placed something underneath the surface of the straw, something hard, like bricks.
Instead of a soft landing he cried out in pain. Then he pulled at the straw to see what was underneath and yelled his annoyance.
Photo by timlewisnm via Flickr.