Christina Oxenberg for Local Observation / THE VIEW
Frankly I’m a little insulted. I spent five years up a hill in the rebel stronghold mountains of southern Colombia. Foreigners have gone to Colombia for the weekend and have been kidnapped.
I was not molested in any way over my five years in residence, I loved it. In the late ‘80s during the years fondly known as La Violencia, I bought a fifteen acre hill in the south, near the border with Ecuador.
There was almost nothing we needed to buy food-wise because everything already grew from our land. Peanuts popped out of the ground, avocados hung from trees, oranges, lemons, bananas, mangos, papayas, eucalyptus, even coffee grew on our land and we used it all. Like any settler I brought something non-indigenous. I planted sweet white baby corn from the Hamptons, and it you know it, you’ll know why I bothered.
Get this farmer wonks: because of the coordinates of altitude from sea level + proximity to the Equator somehow explains why we had four planting seasons a year.
In the pueblo there was a covered open market. I avoided the meats hanging smothered with flies. I bought legumes and eggs which were small and sometimes blue and sometimes green and always scrumptious, and milk, which came in triangular plastic bags.
A single paved road linked us to a larger town one jungle dell over, far too far to bother with.
Hubby drew sketches of the Versailles we designed. No matter what we asked for the workmen said, ‘Si, se puee,’
We built most of the house from the trees on our land. Black cedar for the ceiling posts, sections of bamboo and coffee trunks for the balconies and on I could go with a million details.
Such as a square red cedar desk, where the husband and I presided, four feet by four feet surface, carved engraved decorations, sculpted sultry legs. With oversized opposing thrones.
The views from the balconies were brighter than our future.
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