Our new home is small, but it has a big garden.  We have a few rows of green beans, and several kinds of leafy greens with secrets.  When the gardener digs, there are carrots, turnips or potatoes growing underneath inside the earth.  I always imagined that peanuts swung from trees like lanterns and fell like acorns.  But they too, hug the earth and you have to wash off the mud.

We have a large family of brown ducks.  They swim and dive for fish in the pond.   We can watch them all we want, but we are not allowed to go in the water.  We have the same rules about germs here.   We drink only boiled water and eat only cooked vegetables.  But we can eat all the fruits we want from the trees because rain won’t give you cholera.  We still have to line up for cholera injections at school.

Banana leaves are like big fans that keep the bananas cool.   When we jump on guava tree limbs they bounce and never break.  They have the coconut trees in a corner so that the coconuts that are harder than our skulls won’t fall and knock us out.  The trees are so tall that if we can climb to the top we would see over the wall and maybe all the way to our new school.

We still have no mulberry leaves for my silkworms.  I have to go to my mother’s friend’s house to get mulberry leaves to feed them.

There are farmers nearby, and they come and take care of our garden as well as their own farms.  Next to us there are military barracks.   Behind our house the hillside is thick with trees and bushes.  Nobody goes up there except the soldiers.  There is muddy water surrounding most of the hill, but our wall and gate, and the barracks entrance are all on the road.  We don’t have to enter the barracks there.  If we follow the path in our garden it leads straight to the barracks.

I think that once this was an island because they still call it Green Island.

We are so far from our old school that we go to another school.  It is called Sacred Heart.  The nuns are from a different order.  Our uniforms are different.  My sister is still at the top of her class.

They put me in a musical where we wear daffodil costumes.  We sing Daffodil has come to town in her little yellow gown.

My new best friend is Annabelle.