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The women in that village burned coconut husks for the cooking. They woke early in the morning in the darkness and gathered in the back cooking area in the half light, and although that land was in the subtropics, still it was in the northern hemisphere, and Lunar New Year came always in January or February – in the heart of winter by our standards – and it was chilly in the mornings, so that when I watched the women cooking in the morning they wore great coats of wool or felt or down, secondhand coats from the First World, the coats that had never been sold or were always being discarded or were flawed from the factory or had been stolen in shipment. I was from the American Midwest and did not seem to feel the chilliness.
The cooking areas were roofed with thatch from banana and coconut and bamboo leaves and were open on the sides, so that they faced the banana and chicken yard and the shower box and outhouse which were all out back. The homes themselves were thatch-roofed too and walled with bamboo cane standing upright.
My morning hammock was adjacent to the cooking area, and I situated my feet and head so that I could listen to the women talking quietly and see the coconut husk fire and watch the women going about their tasks.
The ripened coconut is green and shaped like a very large three-sided rugby ball. It hangs down from the underside of very tall and stark coconut trees, like palm trees, which grow on the dikes between the rice paddies. It is harvested with either a long, long pole on the far end of which is a tool like an acutely-beveled ice chisel, or by the village boys who climb the high trunk of the tree, hand over hand and instep over instep, like monkeys, and who twist and turn each fruit on the stem till it snaps and the heavy coconut falls to the ground with a sound or a splash into the paddy.
To prepare the coconut for individual local and urban sale, a heavy, broad machete with a strong backbone and heavy at the far end and no bevel going down to the edge is used to chop away the green husks to a handful-sized white ball, and I have seen men and women both able to do this in their bare hand, bouncing the big coconut in their left hand and chopping at the outer husk with a machete in the right. One great chop on the bottom creates the bottom side on which the coconut may sit. At the point of sale, the machete is used to crack the top, into which slit a straw is slid.
The discarded husks are broken up and set out on the ground or tile yards to dry over time, and it takes a very long time to dry from the fleshy green and white husk to the stringy brown husk that we all know. And these husks are put up – as firewood is for you and me – for the cooking.
Very soon each morning I would get the first of the first – a shot glass of very strong (famously) coffee, which they prepared from a small tin drip, and into which stirred in a heaping half teaspoon of sugar. I would lay in my hammock and smoke and tap the ashes on the floor. The ground was the floor in the kitchen area and in the home and all around. Hard packed alluvial silt. Hard because it was the clay alluvial silt of the Delta, and packed because the rickety home and cooking area and place for my hammock have been here on this spot and trodden upon for centuries.
My looking on at the women was partly in fascination at the many peculiarities (to me) as they went about their tasks that we all of us have done and do and will forever continue to do in different manners. Partly a careful study so that I could remember some very interesting things that I could take with me in my future life (if I had a future life), not the least of which was the making of their special coffee; also, the preparation of breakfasts of fried eggs and pate or pork and rice; also, the management of an open cooking fire – drafting and fueling and carburetion.
And in part it was meditative. Here are the skinny chickens walking in the cooking area and joining into the conversation. The women lived with the chickens in some harmony. Here is the skinny dog with the ugly dewclaws coming up to me for affection. Their way of living with a dog was to largely ignore it. They didn’t live in a dog’s house. The dog lived where it could, and – ironically – lived well. Here are three generations of women doing the cooking. They squatted on the floor where they prepared the food on great plane tree wood chopping blocks.
That was in a very rural village. The cooking with the dried coconut husks. That is not to say that in the smaller district cities and the greater provincial cities or the great metropolises there was not electricity and gas in relative (that is, very imperfect) abundance. Only that in the great majority of the countryside of that country there were, in all respect and even affection and reverence, still very primitive and simple – immediate is the word that comes to mind – ways of life, even now into the 21st-century.
It is also meant to suggest by extrapolation that much of the countryside of this green and blue and white and half black world other peoples – many, many other peoples – live that way of life, too.
Eventually it was day, the sun finally achieving the coconut trees, and the women warmed and took off the old coats, and them always, as they do in that country, wearing pajamas (all day long). The oldest woman – the maternal grandmother…the matriarch – even wore the famous black pajamas.
If only I could believe that she remains to this day and in that fashion even after this free but brooding American withdrew.
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