Sundays

Traditions come slow when you are constantly pulling up roots and trying to plant them again. There has been little consistency in the traditions my little family has held over the past few years. Yet, they hold great value to me. In Newfoundland we would get together with our good friends the Sams to brew wine every couple of months. Events like this have always been good for me and kept the ground from spinning. After a couple months of the spinning sensation that is culture shock, Steph and I have been able to find some traditions that help us lay claim to our own culture here.

Sunday is my favourite day of the week. Once upon a time they consisted of CBC Radio and Church but recent events (moving to the DR) have forced a change. The appeal of CBC has always been, for me, the ease of flicking on a radio and having voices instantly populate the room. A computer playing a podcast is no comparison for a real radio. As for church, that has morphed into something called "Sunday time". A natural lack of like minded people here (at least when it comes to how church should be) has lead us to create our own time of reflection, music and reading. We sing only the songs we like, read long passages out loud and pray. This has become a new tradition and it has stopped the ground from spinning.

The other part of most Sundays is making the Sunday Dinner. Borrowing several pages from Lorna Goodison, we have begun making our own variation of rice and peas on Sundays. The ritual begins with the cracking of a coconut. We don't have a hammer. We have a cement step. After ten good wacks on the sharpest edge of the step you can drain the slightly milky fluid out and save it for the cooking the rice later. With more smashing and careful prying, the hard, fatty flesh of the coconut comes off the bone-like shell. One small piece at a time we grate the coconut and add it to a pot of rice bubbling over the gas. While we wait for the water to be absorbed, we dice onions, garlic and sweet peppers and caramelize them in our Dutch Oven adding hot peppers and other spices. We add the most important part, the guandules to the vegetable mixture. By this time the rice and coconut is ready and we add the rich steaming mixture to the vegetables. We heat and mix it all together adding some lime juice and cilantro to finish it off. The dish is served with a slice of avacado and a poached egg. We eat the leftovers for the rest of the week.

Traditions grow like house plants: slow and tenuously. But they keep our feet on the ground and give us tangible ways to practice our love for family and community, whatever size that may be.