The five senses of home

Sight: After basement suites and city apartments, my eyes are feasting on a bounty of sights. Our bedroom looks onto a coffee field bordered by trees and our kitchen looks onto a field of lambs with lush mountains behind them. All around us are stunning vistas of mountains and valleys, green fields and cities and we have a beautiful sunset delivered every night.

The view of our front yard (from the roof)

                                                      

Touch: Touch is a pretty dominant sense for me (as anyone who has ever gone shopping with me knows) but the most familiar, the one that transports me back in time, is the feel of cement and tile under my feet.Growing up in this communal property, there was no need to put on shoes to run over to the neighbourhood friends and family and the idea of shoes was constricting and annoying. So in the summers and any breaks, I was allowed to run wild and barefooted. However, please don't assume that this a quaint tradition of Costa Rican natives. In fact, Tica grandmothers always looked askance whenever they saw my barefeet and I bore a lot of scoffing, horror, and dark predictions of warts, strokes and much more to befall me if I didn't put on some shoes and socks immediately. I did become quite an expert at getting rid of warts (a necessary evil when frolicking barefoot around frogs and other animals) but my feet are otherwise still intact and my favourite thing about my body!

Taste: Naturally, the cornucopia of fruit, Canadian-Tico-Mennnonite feasts laid out by my family and all my childhood favorites create many tastes that make me feel at home. There are two that stand out.
One is manzanas de agua. Literally translated as water apples, this fruit has yet to make the journey north to my knowledge but I miss it constantly. Part pear, part apple and part dragon fruit, this fruit is shaped like an avocado with a snowy white centre and a beautiful, tender fuchsia skin (the only skin of a fruit I will happily eat). It is ever-so-juicy and sweet. One of the earliest memories is picking an enormous pile and stashing them in my playhouse to eat at my leisure.

The tree

                                              

 The second is Tronaditas, a corn chip covered in salt and lemon. By ten I'd perfected the method of eating them which I still do to this day. Step 1: lick all the salt and lemon off and set aside. Step 2: after stacking all the pre-licked chips, place in palm of your hand and mash between both palms. Step 3, eat all the broken bits. Step 4; bite into the dense middle of the stack. Repeat alternating with unlicked chips for variety.
    My obsession is so well known that when I arrive in Costa Rica, my nieces, Calisha and Danica, always have a stash waiting for me (along with adorable handwritten notes). This time, I found them in drawers, behind curtains, in the shower and taped to the ceiling.

                                          

Smell: Smell is probably my least developed sense and the one with the least amount of memories but my favourite smell is eucalyptus and it might be because our property here is riddled with eucaplyptus trees. As a child, I'd pick leaves, tear them and rub them on me to mimic perfume. A few years ago I found a eucalyptus perfume and I will rarely wear another scent.

Hearing: This one is easy. We live on the mountains and are blessed with beautiful winds! The trees close to my parents house sound likes waves. So much so, that I used to have beach or tidal wave nightmares only to wake up realizing it was the trees. I still loved the sound and would always sleep with my window open. On especially wild nights (or, a few doors down where we are living now in a more exposed knoll, EVERY night) the wind howls loudly and fiercely and it is glorious! I can't wait till rainy seasons hits hard and the howling is combined with thunder!