I was considering trimming this branch in my garden as it was growing quite large and shading the flowers underneath. It’s a good time to top off bushes and trees. With all the rain they’ll sprout new growth in like - seconds (it seems anyway). When I looked up, a clump of bugs lined the branches. But not one bug, several types. They were either duking it out or eating each other. Turns out they were helping each other.

Coco! I screamed, in a voice that was a little too excited.

Go get that book on animals! You know the one we’ve read like a billion times. Here’s those ants sucking the honey out of the other bug’s butt! Here’s that ant we read about!

I lifted Coco up to the branches and sure enough she agreed. Aphids at atop a bump, which was their nest. They had these long black and yellow antennas. Some were till making the nests and some were just there, brooding I guess. Behind several of the aphids was an ant. The ant was as big as the aphid. And sure enough, the ant was sucking honey out of the aphids behind.

Coco ran up to find her book. I get all tingly when we find a real-life example of something we’ve been studying. Coco looked in the index under chapter, Side by Side: Animals Who Help Each Other.

“Tiny green garden insects (these were a bigger cousin of the tiny version) called aphids make honey in their bodies from the plant juices they drink. Ants “milk” honeydew from the aphids almost like a farmer gets milk from a cow. Using it’s antennae, an ant gently strokes the back of the aphid. Out oozes a drop of delicious honeydew for the ant to sip.” The benefit for the aphid for putting up with being milked all the time (I can empathize after breastfeeding two kids!) is that the ant will protect the aphid from predators.

Every time the ant felt an attack coming on - even if it was just the wind - it would rear back, hoist up it’s antennas, and get ready for battle. I’ve been bitten by this ant, and I know it means business.

After explaining three billion things to my kids, it’s nice to see an actual example right in front of our eyes - and one that wasn’t set up in advance by “mommy trying to teach us something.” But here’s a secret: I’ll probably go out and check out those bugs a hundred times before the eggs are hatched and the group moves on. It’s like when I was a little girl and I’d lay on the dock. I’d peer through the cracks in the wood and watch the muscles stick their tongue out and move across the rocks. I could watch for hours. There’s something so mesmerizing, so simple, so just…just…right about it. I guess that’s whatt I’m looking at. And perhaps that’s what my children will learn.

As I was packing up school lunches, I read the “communications” book my daughter comes home with every day. It is a green notebook with notes from her teacher about school. It’s quite a good system. If there’s a field trip, or special dress day, or a note I need to send to the teacher, I write in it. I try to glance at it immediately after every school day in case there’s an assignment for me “to do.” I forgot to look Friday, and I paid for it. Sunday night I had to trudge to the market and get a loaf of bread and a jar of jelly for a gift basket for the school’s janitor and lunch lady.

The supermarket was jammed. Why? I thought. Shouldn’t all you people be home on a Sunday night? Especially since it is pouring rain!! It took me ten minutes to find a place to park. I bumped into people up and down the isles, checked out, flipped my sweatshirt hood back up, and walked back to the car.

As the rainy season starts, we get a few good downpours as if mother nature says: Remember me? Do you remember where your umbrella is? When I’m without the kids, I often go without the umbrella and just get a little wet. The flowers here provide a lesson in durability. The delicate ones eventually wash away. A great many like the heliconias have a waxy skin that lets the rain roll off it’s back, much like a duck. Their roots will bind up a clump of dirt so hard, it would take a backhoe to get them out. For a long time, I sought books as one of my greatest teachers. Can’t get enough of them. As Heinrich Mann said:

A house without books is like a room without windows.

They offer insights and vision into the world.

And flowers? This is the world we are. If the world were filled with flowers, maybe we could be as grounded as they are and all that discomfort would just roll off our backs, even on Sunday nights in search of raspberry jelly.

Bouganvillas bloom and grow so much, at times they’re a hazard. I can see why it’s hard to trim these gorgeous things. I had to duck to pass on this sidewalk. This bunch has been around awhile. It can be tricky getting this flower to establish. They need just enough sunshine, sun, and shade mix. Then, once bigger, the flowering bush seems to thrive on sunshine. More blooms pop up now, during the beginning of our rainy season. Then, they’ll burst another wonderful crop of colors come December. Though, they will flower most of they year, just a little slower. After trimming a few bushes over the years, I’ve gotten a few good scrapes from the thorns along the leaves. But it’s worth it. These colors never fail to impress.

In a western Suburb of San Jose, another organic market has sprouted up. Every Wednesday from 8 a.m. until 11 a.m. (mas or menus - it is Latin America after all!) this gorgeous food market is open at the Cruz Rojo. It was a beautiful sunny morning and the place was busy. I hope it stays that way. I filled my orange cart up with a bounty. The celery was taller than my son. The woman running the market says she’s been working with farmers for 14 years. They didn’t believe her when she asked them to plant some of these odd things like bok choy and red cabbage.

Who’s going to eat that? they said.

Just trust me she told them. They’ll eat it. And there I was sticking a bunch into bag. I’ll be back. And if we tell a few friends, they’ll keep planting and we’ll all be the ones growing stronger in the end.

Growing up in Minnesota, I cherished every moment of sunshine. May through September were jewels. People stripped most of their clothes come April - even March - to let their skin breath something other than layers of synthetic clothes. When my sister came to visit one May in Costa Rica, no matter the weather here, she wore shorts.

I’m didn’t come to Costa Rica to wear pants! she said, even though I’d be wearing socks and sweat pants and a sweater.

Now, I’m inundated with sunshine almost non-stop during the dry season of December through April. Even in the rainy season, the mornings are usually bright with sunshine. Flowers have two blooming seasons here when it changes from dry to rain and back again. Living in two different, yet in some way oddly similar climates and cultures,I pluck gems of each one into my home, back yard, and attitude.

Cosmos is a flower said to represent “the heart of a girl.” Look how simple and yet tall and determined this flower is. Back in Minnesota, I glowed proudly at my crop of cosmos. Butterflies love them, and they are surprisingly easy to grow. I still love these gems. But look how much this flower offers: the innocence of color, the resilience of change, and the stamina to grow again. It’s like a whole, little universe unto itself.

I think it was named perfectly, don’t you?

Every new house, apartment, and even boat I move into I immediately plan a garden. I can’t help it. And, every time I leave that house, apartment or boat, I wave good-bye to another crop of plants and sigh. All that work? And for what?

The first house I moved into in Costa Rica was downtown. Not off to the side of downtown in a neighborhood or suburb, no smack dab in the middle of San Jose. This house had a tiny front yard and every morning I would nurture the struggling bougainvillea trying to guide a vine towards a shimmer of light. I’d pluck out overgrown impatiens and shoo away the big paws of my three dogs so they wouldn’t trample my new seedlings. Just as the vines of the purple plant began to stretch over the fence, we moved.

On this boat I lived on, I bought all these pots. I watered them until the end of the season when the petunias looked like long skinny necks of a giraffe and the mums were huge big-bellied blossoms. I left the pots to the new owners.

I owned a home once where I transformed a trash-filled back yard into a blooming English garden. I sawed planks into pathways; picked out chunks of broken glass from the soil; and hauled perennials and annuals from the nursery until my wallet and my back ached. I can smell the garden when I look at photos, and if I close my eyes, I can still feel the stems brush past my legs when I walk down the path, an iced tea in my hand.

The plot of yard I have now is small, tropical like (which means shady) and offers a few sleeves of dirt for blooming potential. I gained custody of a few plants when I left my last home. Most were almost dead. They’d been unattended to and ignored. I’m not much of a green thumb, and I don’t care to study about plants. I just like figuring them out on my own terms, learning tidbits of information from people more knowledgeable than me, and ultimately letting the plant just do it thing.

The planting season is on hold because there’s no rain right now. We just sprinkle our crop with the hose every few days and they seem happy, blooming and taking hold. I drove by the old house I lived in downtown. The bougainvillea has taken off. It’ s purple spreads now over the top of the iron gate. I’ll never be a master gardener, I don’t have the patience to study that much. When I think of these tiny plots of land, chunks of soil, maybe I left some beauty behind. Maybe someone else will be moved to pick up a trowel and feel the energy of the earth right there under their thumbs.

So when it starts to rain, I’ve got this idea to haul in some bricks, build up the dirt, and find some more purple blossoms, orchids maybe. A Japanese theme - wouldn’t that look great? I could get some bamboo, and put the fountain over there, a few chairs, and……….