Life List

August 4, 2010

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One Life to Live: A Wish List

This post is a little off topic and not exactly related to gardening. Please indulge me as I go off on a completely decadent, shoe-gazing tangent for a moment. Ignoring is also an option. Please also note that I wrote the bulk of this before my birthday last week so the tense is a bit off. One of my goals way back when was to stop spreading myself around and to bring more into this site, even if it doesn’t always fit neatly into the “GARDENING” package. I do try to stay on topic most days.

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It’s my birthday this week and it’s got me on the subject of how I want to spend the year until my next birthday rolls around. 37 is feeling like a big one for me. Like I am poised for a lot of change that I can’t yet determine. When I was younger, I imagined that 33 would be my best year, ever: an ideal age. I imagined that by 33 I would be, “…kicking so much ass!” What that said for the years after 33, I do not know. I only managed to get that far in my imaginings. Back then, my version of kicking ass meant feeling comfortable with myself, feeling accomplished in my work, and not putting up with or eating anymore shit. That is how Gayla at Age 33 looked to me. And then 33 rolled around and it was the year of the TV show that went wrong and other perceived failures, and I spent the remainder of the year carrying around a lot of anger and feeling generally AWKWARD. So 33 wasn’t all that to be sure.

Last year I turned 36. I suddenly felt OLD. It was like I had stepped over an invisible line and whoa, what the hell just happened there? I now have a prominent streak of grey hair on my left side, which I’m really not complaining about. I like it enough as far as grey hair goes. It’s just that sudden physical changes are a bit freaky. I lost a lot of friends at a young age so I became aware of the very real possibility of death and dying earlier than most. But last year I suddenly became more conscious of my mortality in a physical way. That said, I don’t mean for this to be a diatribe on growing older. For the most part I like getting older and look forward to what’s yet to come. I very much appreciate everything that experience has taught me, for better and for worse. I like the person I am now a hell of a lot more than the person I was at 25. Or 30. Or at 33, come to think of it.

I am much closer to achieving that ideal I imagined I’d reach at 33. But it’s a slightly shifted ideal, one that has changed as I have changed and my desires and expectations have matured. I enjoy things more. I find more joy in little details and in the work I do. I’m much less afraid and much more able to see what scares me and push against it effectively. Or still be kind of screwed up about certain things and be okay with that, knowing I’ll figure it out eventually. Or not. Because I’m also a bit more comfortable with my fallibility. I am more conscious of my needs and better able to say no to the things I need to say no to. And saying no doesn’t feel so much like I’m strapping on a pair of boots and going to war as a result. Because I’m also more comfortable with the fact that some people won’t like it when I do. I’m mostly okay with being perceived as a “bitch” sometimes. I hate the subtext behind that word. Being able to say no when I need to has also opened up the possibility for saying yes more often, too. At 36, going on 37 (now going on 38. yikes), I do feel more at ease with myself and accomplished. And I do believe that I am in fact eating far less shit.

All of this to say that my pal Karen recently celebrated a birthday. And on her blog she talks about making this the Year That She Becomes A Woman of a Certain Age. I was very inspired by the post and the way she has defined her goals for the year. Several years ago, when I kept a photoblog that was also more or less a journal, I wrote a list of “Things I Want to Do Before I Die”. It was a vague list as I did not expect that I would accomplish all of those things in my lifetime. It was more or less a guide post for what I might like to do and a kick in the pants to make some of them happen. Inspired by Karen (again), I thought I would resurrect that list and continue it here, the week of my 37th birthday. Some items from the old list have made it to this one and a few have even been accomplished. I did not include anything too personal, because I do believe in keeping some aspects of my life private, and I very much doubt you’d care to know regardless.

Not surprisingly, a good many of the items on my list have to do with travel, food, and PLANTS.

Experiencing Fresh Cacao: The Sequel

Two years ago I wrote about my disappointing experience eating fresh cacao in Cuba. Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is the tree that chocolate comes from. The fruit is a big pod that forms directly on the trunk and older growth of the tree. It kind of looks like a squash and smells like one too.

Chocolate is made by fermenting, sun drying, and sometimes slow roasting the little beans that form inside the pod. However, a sweet, white, and sticky flesh grows around the beans that can be eaten fresh out of the pod. Eating that fresh flesh was on my list of things to do before I die; however, my first attempt was thwarted by an over-ripe pod that was neither sweet nor sticky and kind of tasted like a giant eraser for BIG mistakes.

When we were planning this trip I knew that we would come into contact with fresh cacao again and that I was not going to miss the opportunity to have a proper do-over. Still, I thought trying cacao in Dominica would mean making a special trip to a cacao plantation, but it turns out that cacao trees grow practically everywhere on the island. The tree grows well in mountain regions where the weather is humid and shaded by taller forest trees. That pretty much describes the entire island of Dominica, save the city where we stayed and a handful of dryer areas on the west coast.

Most flights come into Dominica on the east coast and it’s about an hour and half drive through the interior to get to the capital, Roseau. I must have spotted a million cacao trees along the route, although we did not stop to pick one on that day. I had hoped I could buy one from the market, but while I did purchase several unusual items there I never did see a cacao pod for sale. I think that may be simply because it is so easy to come by. Why buy one at the market when you can pick a pod right off the tree growing in your own yard?

Click for notes.

Experiencing Fresh Cacao

Photo by Gayla Trail

On our third day in Cuba we took a trip organized by our hotel up into the Sierra Maestra mountains. There were a few different legs to the excursion, the first of which was a stop at around the halfway mark to get our bearings and snap a few photos of the view. It also served as a welcome break from the insane drive which involved our driver racing our van against another van, narrowly passing in some very extreme conditions and taking roller coaster turns on a road with almost nothing between our vehicle and a very long drop down the side of the mountain. Most of us hung onto our seats with our hearts in our mouths. Others felt sick but no one threw up. Did I mention there were no seat belts?

Photo by Gayla Trail
The view from halfway up looking towards the ocean.

We stopped at a schoolhouse where a group of farmers were setup along a short wall selling fruit and handicrafts. I bought a red necklace made from seeds, 2 shell rings, and a fresh cacao pod. Cacao is the fruit that chocolate is made from. It grows on a tree but looks like a squash on the outside and is filled with beans on the inside that are transformed into delicious chocolate. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see the cacao pod sitting among little bananas and green-skinned oranges. It was quite an unexpected surprise! Tasting fresh cacao directly from the pod is on a list of life experiences that I hope to have before I die. I have seen and held a dried, whole cacao on a few occasions and I have tasted whole, roasted cacao beans but I have never seen a fresh, recently picked cacao pod. And it only cost 25 cents!

I took it back into the van with me pleased that I was finally going to get the chance to scratch that item off my list. My fellow passengers were all curious about the strange squash-like fruit I had purchased. I was so distracted by the thrill of it all that I forget to take pictures. The photos you see here were taken later in the day only minutes before the sun went down.

Later that afternoon I took the pod with me to the hotel restaurant and cut it open with a bread knife. This is what I found inside.

Photo by Gayla Trail

I’m not sure why — perhaps it is due to my love of chocolate — but I had always imagined the insides soft, luscious, and fragrant. I imagined that opening a cacao pod would be sort of like opening up a passionfruit; dry on the outside but with a fragrant and unusually sensual inside. Perhaps other cacao pods are like that, but mine was quite dry, the pulp stringy and alien-like. It did not look appetizing. It did not smell like much at all.

I pulled out a bean and we all had a taste. Raw cacao tastes incredibly acrid, bitter and entirely unpleasant, akin to chewing on a pink eraser For Big Mistakes. Having eaten roasted beans I can see how that acrid, bitter taste would be transformed by the proper processing; this process involves fermenting, drying and roasting the beans. Unfortunately I would never get a chance to see my pod through those stages because I was not allowed to bring any natural materials (plant matter, shells, rocks, sand, fauna, etc) back from our trip. In the end, raw cacao was not what I expected but I could care less about the outcome. It was an exciting experience and something I can scratch off The List!

You Grow Girl™

Books by Gayla Trail

One Life to Live: A Wish List

Experiencing Fresh Cacao: The Sequel

Experiencing Fresh Cacao