Surrender

One of the reasons my rent is so reasonable here at my house in Boguerón is that I have been maintaining the yard for the past two years. Doing it myself rather than paying someone else to do it.

Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but you have to understand how things grow down here. People have joked that you could stick a two by four in the ground and it would sprout roots and grow. Well that’s really not that much of a joke. Just take a look at this:

Recently it’s been harder for me to keep things up the way I’d like. It’s not that things are wild and overgrown so much as it just isn’t what I’d like it to be and as I’ve said, it’s a two hour lawn and I’ve got a one hour back so I’ve been less than enthusiastic about strapping on the weed whacker and going out to do battle with the grass. The last time I did it it took three days altogether. Half of the front lawn one day, half a couple of days later and the back yard a couple of days after that. I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t work through the pain, and there was still some that I just didn’t get to. My lease is up at the end of October and the house is on the market. I’ll probably stay here until it sells, and who knows how long that will be? And I want the house and grounds to look as best as possible.

Yesterday at my neighbor’s they had a man with a weed whacker doing their lawn. I went up there and asked the man, who is a Charles Bronson look-alike, to come see me when he was through up there. A half an hour later he and my neighbor came down to see me. I asked him how much he would charge to come cut the grass twice a month. The odd thing was, that everything I said to Charles Bronson in Spanish, was repeated to him by my neighbor as if he was translating somehow. Anyway, we agreed to a price of $25 ($12.50 a visit) and shook hands on the deal.

I asked him to come next week. He said he’d be here on Wednesday. We’ll see. It’s Panama, after all.