counterclockwise

The good people of Tacuati have (correctly) figured me for a sucker. Yes, I’ve taken another step down the road to dying a crazy, old maid cat lady and accepted a second kitten.

I couldn’t not do it. The whole sordid story involves half a dozen sad-eyed children, a dead mother stray, two piteously mewling fuzz balls, and the cool, drenching rain of a Paraguayan autumn. And now (The shame! The horror!) I’m a single woman writing about her two cats on her website.

The new one is female, white with a few spots, possibly a distant relative of Mimosa’s. She’s a wretched little beast, an incessant screamer and an inveterate clawer. I’d finally gotten Mimosa 100% litterbox trained and coming when called. Now this newcomer has me starting over from square one with spoon feedings and urine mopping.

The kids who found her suggested the name Margarita, which means daisy in this part of the world. I’m going to treat that word’s English meaning (along with that of Mimosa) as entirely irrelevant and coincidental. You can’t buy tequila and triple sec in Tacuati, nor champagne. Or even real orange juice, as far as that goes.

The good news is, I should be getting passionfruit this year. In the five months that I´ve been in my house, my vine has gone from a little 10-leafed twig to a 20 foot long monster plant. There are plenty of things that don´t grow well in my part of the country (green vegetables, for example), but when it works, it really works.

The Guaraní word of the day is -kuera, which is the suffix used to make plurals. Che mbaracaja’i has become che mbaracaja’ikuera.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Guaraní, Pictures, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.