Porcupines, pain and promising plants

Written to Macire by Boubacar Traore

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien

It is not a stretch to say that it has been tough being a dog at Fazenda Alfheim of late: first there was Negão's eye piercing at the hands of a wayward twig, and shortly thereafter Muninn made the mistake of trying to play with a porcupine, with predictably painful results. Fortunately, both dogs are doing fine.

Less fortunately, I broke my left clavicle or collar bone during an amicable Sunday tussle with Esben on the lawn of the fazenda of our good friends Márcio and Heather. This is the second time our middle son has broken one of my bones while wrestling, a rib in Oslo and now a collar bone in São Paulo. Most ungrateful children suffice with writing tell-all biographies about their [choose your adjective] parents, but ours would seem to have a preference for more corporeal form of retribution: I have broken 5 bones in my lifetime, 40% of which can be traced directly to wrestling with Esben. On the plus side, the bursitis in my right shoulder will get a month of solid rest as I am required to wear a "figure-of-8" splint for 21-30 days.

Thankfully, another good friend, Paula Afrange, has been kind enough to put me up in her apartment in São Paulo during my first critical week of recovery, greatly easing day-to-day logistics as I have had numerous meetings in the Megalopolis.

In my absence, Lone lorded over Alfheim, both figuratively and literally, while thriving in her newly carved out, albeit diminished, corner of our former garden.

In parallel, phase I of planting season was executed without a hitch by Esben and the team: pasture 3 and our former garden, a total of 3 hectares, was planted with heirloom corn, a variety called Amarelão, in five-six days. Less than two weeks later, the early results are promising (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). That said, given the precarious nature of any crop activity, and the momentousness of our getting this right and producing all of our own animal feed, all prayers and positive thoughts are most welcome. Phase II of planting season will begin with the next minguante or waning moon on September 24th, when we will plant other varieties of heirloom corn, including BRS Missões, Lombo Baio and BRS Planate.

Finally, on Monday, September 13th, Esben and I will head off on a massive 2,500 km road trip to Mato Grosso do Sul, more precisely to the fazenda of Toshio Hisaeda, a free-range hog farmer that I wrote about in my blog post of June 29, A video tour of Fazenda Alfheim.