Rice

The rainy season has started in earnest and we haven't seen the sun in days. Part of me is sure that we'll never see the sun again, but the well-seasoned part of me has seen rainy seasons in many different countries and knows it can't last forever.

Yesterday, true to my current obsession with pickled and fermented things, I made kimchi. It's still in the fermentation process. I keep eyeing it, thinking that I should eat it now anyways, but when I go to unscrew the lid on the jar, my Superstar Husband says, "Rae, uh uh, it's not ready." He's always there, just over my shoulder, floating around making sure that I don't eat unready kimchi. I don't know what I would do without him.

The other day he went out to take photos with our landlord. Khun Thanom, his name is. They were planting rice in the paddies around his house and he thought it would be beautiful to photograph, so he came to fetch Chinua. This endeared me to my landlord even more, because people planting rice are one of my favorite sights in the world, lovely and photogenic.

Our Canon DSLR camera body is broken. It still sort of works, but the shutter sensor (something, don't ask me) is so slow as to make it almost unusable. We have good lenses, we just need a new camera body (ours is the 10D, from 2004, a dinosaur in digital years--and we did get a LOT of shots from it) but haven't been able to afford it yet. This means that Chinua hasn't been taking photos, which is so sad, almost tragic.

So it was wonderful to see some new stuff from him, as he persevered with the not-working-so-great camera.

Oh, how I love the rice planting. People do it in big groups, here and in India. It must be hard, bending your back all day. Rice planting during the rainy season is one of my first memories of moving to Goa. After the rice is first seeded, close together, it is pulled up and replanted with plenty of space for the plants to grow.

I'm falling more and more in love with this place.

Photos courtesy of Chinua Ford.