Hot Golf, Cool Baseball, Green Dreams

My mom's parched backyard

Only a few days remaining in our stateside travels before a most welcome return to Costa Rica. It’s amazing just how good the “green season” sounds, even with its promise of thunderstorms, after a couple of weeks of West Texas weather: bone dry, boiling hot days of 100+ temperatures and long, slow-roasting evenings in the 90’s. How do people live here, I ask myself over and over. In fact, I’ve asked a few residents and no one seems to have an answer. They get a silly grin on their faces, roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.

        

But live here they do and incredibly, they even go outside during the day and survive -- grocery shopping, going to work, visiting the library, running errands. They even play golf!

         

Goodwill golf clubs

Which leads me to my topic for the day, my new golf clubs. Layne and I had transported our good clubs and bigheaded drivers from California to Portland last summer, thinking that with all the family golf players in Oregon, we’d probably get the most use out of them there. Climate change has made us re-think that notion since during most of our June visit this year, the weather was rainy and chilly -- not exactly my idea of good golf weather. We had a few nice days and managed to make the most of them with nine holes at King City one day and eighteen at Tri Mountain another. But we also had in mind putting together a set of clubs for use here in Texas so we could play when visiting my mom and perhaps even transporting some down to Costa Rica as well.

         

Since I’m not a terribly serious or skilled golfer, it had occurred to me that I might find an inexpensive set of clubs here in Texas on Craigslist. Indeed, there were some offered but none that fit the bill. I needed women’s clubs and didn’t want to spend much. But I never expected to find the clubs I needed at Goodwill.

         

Mother and I had gone to an enormous thrift store in town, Christians in Action. They had huge racks of clubs, organized only by size -- all 4 irons, 5 irons, etc. jammed together on stacked wooden frames. To figure out which were women’s clubs was a gargantuan project. Although the clubs were bargain-priced at $2.39 each, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of clubs and the undertaking I faced in finding what I wanted from the hundreds there.

         

So-called "fairway" on the 5th hole

So on we went to Goodwill to see what they might have. What a surprise to find only a small number of clubs, easy to sort through, standing in a large open box. I quickly noticed “First Lady” on an iron and realized it was a woman’s club. It looked in pretty good shape so I continued looking through the selection and found the entire set was there, from the driver to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 irons and a wedge -- all of the same brand, all in darned good condition. The price? Wait for it… 99 cents each! And if that wasn’t bonanza enough, I also found a nice bag, in better condition than my own, for $2.98. I got the whole set for about $12.

         

That’s the good news. The bad news was the condition of the municipal course I played on. Fairway? What fairway? Oh, you mean that dried out corridor with scraggly grass here and there and hard dirt everywhere else? Given the desperate drought conditions hereabouts, however, one could expect nothing else. So I’ve played twice now, early in the morning to avoid the heat, making the best of the course conditions and finding myself quite satisfied with my new irons. The driver leaves much to be desired but that may just be “operator error.”

         

It seems the secret to survival in this weather is to find something fun to do inside an air-conditioned building. To that end, Mother and I jumped in her air-conditioned car and drove a few blocks over to the air-conditioned Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho where a fascinating exhibit is on display depicting the history of women in baseball. Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball dispels the myth of women’s baseball as only a brief phenomenon of the 1940’s when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was in its heyday, later celebrated in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks, Madonna and Geena Davis. Through photos, original posters, framed postcards, game programs and magazine articles, the exhibit reveals the birth of women’s ball in the mid-1800’s through the onset of the sport at women’s colleges, such as Vassar in 1866 and Smith College in 1879, and on to the present day crop of outstanding athletes swinging bats and hurling balls. Organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance, which takes their exhibitions into just 100 small and medium-sized communities each year, the exhibit in San Angelo is the only stop for the show in Texas. If Linedrives and Lipstick comes to your area, don’t miss it. It was well worth going out in the heat.

         

Now it’s on to Costa Rica and the luscious tropical weather I love. Pura Vida, here we come! 

Mango Manna from Heaven

Well, it’s time to travel again. We’re off to the USA tomorrow morning for visits with my mother in Texas, Layne’s sister and family in Oregon, his son and family from Washington State and my son and grandson from California. We may even make it down to our place in Pilot Hill to check out our house, see what needs painting or repair and get “stuff” from the barn. It promises to be a fun-filled but busy six weeks or so.

Juan Santamaria Airport

We’ll head out early in the morning to catch the 7:00 a.m. bus to Juan Santamaria Airport, a 40-minute ride that will cost us about $1.50 each. Our 9:30 a.m. flight on American Airlines will deliver us into San Angelo, Texas, at 5:40 p.m., a good schedule but pricey tickets. Travel to the States is no longer the bargain it was only a year ago, but family calls so we find a way to make the trip.

Of course, it’s hard to think of leaving Costa Rica, even though we are heading into the rainy season, or as Casey Bahr, another Costa Rican blogger calls it, “The Emerald Season.” Having now gone through two dry seasons here, we can definitely appreciate the "green" season a little more as instead of dry patches, the grasses are now abundant, the flowers are blooming, the trees have filled out with shiny leaves. Everything is… well, vibrant green again.

Mangos ripe for the picking

And boy, are the fruits coming into season. Everywhere we walk, it seems, we pass under mango trees, branches literally drooping with ripe fruit. We hurry to get out from under them for fear a mango may take that moment to fall, and a grapefruit-sized mango hitting you on the head would not be good! Piles of ripened mangos and other fruits unfamiliar to us litter the ground, free for the taking. Wild cilantro grows like a weed and tall yucca plants produce edible underground roots. Our neighbor’s orchard is flush with limons (lemons), limes and mandarinas (mandarin-like oranges). Coconut palms are heavy with their crop. It is our considered opinion that no one should ever starve to death in Costa Rica. Just grab some produce off a tree!

Flowers grow year-round here but they seem of even richer color now with purple bougainvillea, crimson and yellow helaconia, red hibiscus, glorious buds of pink and orange and the lovely yellow flowers that line our driveway all in blossom.

The dump truck gets a tug from the backhoe!

When we return in early July, it will be interesting to see what changes have been made in our local surroundings as some major bulldozing and grading work has been happening on the slope below our front patio. Our landlords have put in a switchback road leading to a bridge across the creek and up the other hillside where their property continues. Our landlady Odie wants a little gazebo or picnic area up there so this landscaping is the first step toward that goal. It is a rather steep slope so watching the big backhoe do its work then the heavy truck with its load of gravel tear up and down the hill has been a little heart-stopping now and then. Let’s just say these heavy equipment workers drive about like Ticos on the roads! At one point, the truck tried to back up the newly graveled slope but when the tires started slipping and churning up the gravel, the backhoe operator had to fasten a chain on to the truck and haul it back up the hill.

I just hope all the noise and human activity doesn’t scare away the monkeys from visiting now and then. Recently, this little guy showed up in a tree in our backyard, apparently all alone, perhaps a young male that’s been shoved out of the troop by some jealous macho monkey. Such is life in the jungle!