Guatemala

In January, we went to Guatemala. Surely one of the most intensely strange and beautiful places on earth. A riot of colours; flowers, fabrics, markets of fruit and vegetables, painted buildings, old stone ruins crumbling into flowerbeds, school buses painted up brightly... music and firecrackers in the evenings and stunning, striking views everywhere you look.

Probably this blog is just an excuse to post some of my Guatemala pictures.

Anyway, I want to go back. When we came back to Ontario, in February, I couldn't get over how ugly the landscape seemed; so gray and flat and cold. The people looked sickly and pinched; even their clothes looked drab and ill-fitting. Now we are approaching summer solstice and everything here is lovely and green but it still can't hold a candle to Guatemala.

So, yesterday, I spent the day weeding and mulching two very long, very weedy rows of beans. I have a dry bean garden out at Karen's place. I picked up my mom in the morning and we drove out to Karen's for a visit. We drove through some of the prettiest countryside I know of in Ontario - the pastoral farm country of Waterloo County, past Mennonite farms with their huge, well cared for gardens and barns, fields of corn, wheat and soybeans, vast expanses of yellow canola blossoms, apple orchards and stone farmhouses with lines of clean laundry blowing in the wind.

You have to hand weed around beans if you don't want to disturb their shallow roots and even then, I disturbed a few of them. I hope they'll get over it. At the end of the day, we all went out for dinner to a popular little place in nearby Belwood. We were just about to order when a hummingbird smacked into the plate glass window.

There were some curious little kids fooling around nearby and they seemed about to descend on the tiny bird so I went out and scooped it up in the hood of my sweater and walked away to a quiet place in a sunny field. I sat there with it perched on the sweater and looked at it. It was a young ruby-throated hummingbird with an iridescent green back and a long, thin black beak. It was quite thoroughly stunned and kept jerking its head as though trying to shake itself awake. It was incredibly, shockingly tiny and perfect. At one point it extended one of its inch-long wings, then turned its peanut-sized head to look at me. I could hardly breathe. I finally did breathe, when it suddenly lifted up and flew away with a faint buzzing hum.

It made me think of Guatemala; the brightness, the impossibility of it. So much beauty packed into a space the size of my thumb. Something so small that not only lives but flies so fast and sure, that is not only covered in feathers but in feathers of metallic, iridescent colours, that not only eats but eats the nectar of flowers with its perfectly adapted bill. How impossibly fantastic.

Yet, there it was, in the heart of drab Ontario. Not-so-drab-after-all Ontario.

The tiniest things in nature tie the whole world together.