Home Away from Home

© Nick Sievering

Mayan idols outside the house in Atenas

I woke up around six o’clock the next morning, which typically only happens about every other summer solstice. Sunlight was already beaming through the windows and I could hear countless bird calls that were totally foreign to me. I could also hear the family talking in the kitchen. Their Spanish was far beyond my level of comprehension, so I listened to the conversation as the consistent rhythm of familiar syllables linked together beautifully.

I walked out the patio door to find myself looking at the most tropically lush property I had ever seen in person. Franco’s land was situated near the bottom of a mountain bowl, where fruit trees, wild orchids and tons of exotic animal life flourished. It looked and felt like the Krohn Conservatory back in Cincinnati, only without walls.

As I absorbed the scenery, an old woman carrying a machete walked outside from the opposite side of the house. She looked a bit shocked when she saw me and I’m sure I looked equally shocked, if not terrified, when I saw her. She smiled.

“Buenos días,” she said. “Yo soy Jackie. La madre de Franco. ¿Quiere su desayuno hoy?”

“Uhhh,” I replied, trying to stall long enough to remember something from my three quarters of elementary Spanish. I smiled in return, nodded my head and just said “Sí,” completely ignorant of what I was committing to.

She went back into the house and promptly returned with hot coffee, mango juice, a huge stack of toast
© Adam Sievering / RumBum.com
A little groggy and two different kinds of fruit jam. I thanked her for the deluxe breakfast and thanked myself for having learned enough in those 100 level Spanish courses to get hooked up.

After serving my brother and me breakfast, Jackie resumed her business with the machete by hacking huge bundles of plantains out of a tree that was no more than twenty feet from the house. That afternoon, she made us a typical arroz con pollo lunch, embellished with fried plantain with cinnamon. This meal would become a staple of our diet during the course of our stay in Costa Rica, as well as Jackie’s signature French-influenced pasta dishes.

In addition to Franco and his mother Jackie, there were four others living in the house: Franco’s nephew, his nephew’s girlfriend and his two young children. The family of six was extremely patient with our poor Spanish and actually seemed to take pleasure in helping us improve.

They allowed my brother and me to explore their property at any time, where we discovered mango, banana, plantain and orange trees, in addition to wild bamboo. Franco explained that in the course of his twenty years of living in Atenas, he collected a motley variety of plant life from all around the country to grow in his backyard, which I found to be an isolated paradise perfectly suited to casually stroll through and find some peace of mind.

These walks became part of my daily routine. After breakfast, before the scorching sun was beating down on the valley like a smoldering hammer, I walked the grounds of the house in Atenas. As I relaxed amidst the company of toucans, morpho butterflies and agouti (imagine a squirrel-beaver hybrid), I realized that I was living in a tropical Walden, miles removed from any tourist destination and separated from everything I knew in the United States by a giant body of water. I was finally off the grid with no one to answer to and nothing to burden me. I felt liberated for the first time in a long while.

At the risk of making a clichéd travelers’ allusion, I found wisdom in a few lines written by Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.” In essence, I had finally made it to the country and had all the time I needed to console myself from my routine back home.

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