One thing we have noticed about Puerto Rico is that it just isn’t nearly as homogenized and standardized as most of the rest of the U.S. that we have visited. The randomness of life is still strongly present and we love it! You never know what you will run into and often times we turn our head and say, “Wow! Did you see that?” Or “Well, that was random!”
Just the other day we saw an ice cream truck towing a car. We often see horses in the back of small pickups. The fishing supply store, La Estación, is also a favorite bar in town. Or how about the giant rock painted to look like a face?
El Cabezudo
Recently, and quite often lately, we have had to go to Rincón Rental which is both a party rental store and landscaping supply store. You can get your chainsaw and mower blades and they can sharpen everything for you as well. At the most recent trip they offered us up some local produce called guamá which is a sweet, slimy pod.
Guamá – a nice treat when you need a break from landscaping
We got to talking about our finca (farm) and the reason for the various trips to the store such as a chainsaw stuck in a tree and another bent lawnmower blade. One of the guys told me that we must plant based on the “fases de la luna” or moon phases. When I asked him what he meant by that he said we should plant things that we want to grow tall when the moon is waning (menguante, a new Spanish word for me) and when we want root vegetables to grow we should plant the seeds on a full moon because the pull of the tides will bring them more deeply into the earth. I thought his ideas were pretty interesting!
Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t often get biodynamic gardening advice from the folks at lawnmower shops! If you listen more than you talk, you can learn a lot from people even in the most random of places.
And when you embrace the randomness of life, you tend to find yourself in ever more interesting adventures with cool characters, strange flavors and odd tales. But the really funny thing is that we are starting to become those random, odd and eccentric people ourselves! Things are starting to become less and less weird to us every day and just seem a normal part of the fabric of life here. We are finding that what we call random almost always has some sort of story or reasoning behind it.
Even in our own life, we have strange things all around. But they make sense to us. Why do we have a pile of rocks on the porch of the chicken coop? Let me tell you a story of a humongous hawk. Why do we walk around with these funny wide brimmed hats and no shirts? Let me tell you about the intensity of the sun here. Why is there a box of baby turkeys in our bathroom? Let me tell you about our food plans for this land.
Why are these chickens half green and blue and half brown? There is a reason
I guess that is what we call adjusting. We are one with the randomness of life. We are not so standard anymore. From an outside perspective without the backstory and reasons (and maybe even still), we probably seem random and odd. But in our own way we fit in perfectly here with all the other fun randomness and characters! Well, I suppose it’s like they say in Spanish: Dime con quién andas, y yo te diré quién eres. Tell me with whom you walk (go about), and I will tell you who you are.
If that means random and a little eccentric, so be it. I own it and love it and am so thankful to live in a place where my weirdness somehow becomes “normal”.
In Colorado, we were odd to have something as simple as chickens. Here, that is just normal. In Colorado, we were weird to not spend a lot of money and to fix things ourselves; here that is normal. In Colorado we were strange having tropical plants everywhere (that we could), here that is normal.
Weird is relative. I don’t mind pushing the boundaries every now and again. It’s how we stay young and have fun. So go on, try something new and weird. Go your own way. It feels pretty darn good, if not a little random.