I am so glad I took my camera – in fact I’m rarely without it these days when I walk on the beach.  The past week has produced some unusual beach offerings – these have quite elaborate and individually styled, not just a mere plonking down of a dead something some flowers and food.  About 10 days ago there was a group of two small goat heads and one severed partial leg in the sand.  Gruesome, and I have no idea why. 

Two young goat's heads and one partial leg - no signs of any other parts.

A few days later this interesting arrangement was down near the incoming tide, right where I usually access the beach – there was no one in sight,  but it cannot have been there long. 

In the early morning light, the orientation, which always feels to me to be the same, is clearly to the south east more or less… towards the Atlantic a couple of hundred miles away from this Montevideo beach at Carrasco. Here it is technically the River Plate, but very wide even at this point and behaves like ocean.

This poignant one above speaks to me of babies, one male and the other female, and very young I’d judge by the feeding bottles and the dummies/comfortors/chupas in pink and blue. Among the flowers are pink and blue ribbons. Are these babies on the way, have they been born and this is a thakyou gesture? Have they been lost? Pulled at my heartstrings, anyway.

And then today, this one, again as in all the pics the heads of the sacrificed birds are all nearest the sea with the bodies arranged in a general SE direction. What was different was the 7 or 8 bags of food (corn in one, beans another, something unidentifiable that looked like stew, and so on) arranged in a circle around them, and a sandy hollow near every bag with the remains of a candle sitting in the sand.   Near the white hen’s head was a jar of something that looked like candied honey – but forgive me – I did not stoop to smell it even, let alone dip my finger in …..

Now that I have been paying serious attention for a while, you can imagine my photo files are expanding and include striking differences in among common themes.  Later this week I will be travelling for a while but will resume my coastal walks when I return – hope I don’t miss something amazing.  I feel like begging one of my friends to take a camera to the beach each day while I’m away ….

I had never arranged or observed a chimney being swept before – I guess when we were kids Mum had it done while we kids were at school, for obvious reasons- there were three of us.  So although we had once or twice lived in a house with a chimney it was never long enough to need to have it done, but I could have been pushing our luck there, though.  Still, with the onset of winter here, I decided although I’d procrastinated last year, it really had to be done this year. A friend gave the number of someone she used, and quite late saturday afternoon last week along came Washington and Mario on their motor bike with a neat little trailer behind containing the brooms, extension poles and gear, including respiratory masks I was pleased to see.  A few years ago no one would have bothered with such safety gear in this country – it is heartening to see hard hats, steel toe boots, back supporting belts, safety goggles and so on provided and know that their use is mandatory and monitored. 

I had to move the clutter off the mantlepiece, cover the computer with dust cloth and provide some logs of wood to anchor the huge plastic sheet in place along the shelf.  The floor rug was moved back and newspaper put down – as you can see in the photo that moved around during the process! but at the end it was all bundled up into a large plastic bag and they swept the floor of what little powdery soot was still there.  Mario climbed right into the fireplace, and even if my spanish was brilliant there is no way I could have worked out what on earth he was saying, but clearly these two are a well practised team and even understand jokes delivered with  masks over mouths and noses and a wall of plastic between them.  They came with a variety of brooms some of which they used and others no, I guess they’re prepared for all sizes and shapes of chimneys.  As they swept and moved the brushes higher and higher in the chimney one by one additional steel extenders were screwed on and pushed up the chimney, soot raining down on the newspaper on the floor of the fireplace behind the plastic.  

The whole process was reversed when the brushes come back down.   The verdict was it wasn’t very sooty considering we hadn’t swept it in the 6 years we’ve been here ( I had been a bit nervous about how much stuff was up there – we have wood fires all winter long, and chimney fires are dangerous)    Prep time and cleanup took around an hour – they were very particular – and it all cost a fraction of what I imagine it would cost in Aus or US – 800 pesos or around $40.  It was all fascinating and I remembered to take a couple of pics – oh, and yes, remembered to touch Washington on the sleeve for good luck  🙂  – yes, I am a bit superstitious, and who, knows, it can’t hurt, right?

Shortly after sunrise this morning, at around 7am, the beach was beautiful.  The tide was way out and just turning as I walked eastwards into the early morning sun; there was  only a handful of people from one end to the other; and very little rubbish abandoned  by yesterday’s and last night’s visitors.

Jelly fish are ‘in season’ these past few days UL and LR, someone’s diggings UR were about to be inundated and wiped away;  something large lifted a large jellyfish LR to leave the print of its underside in the path of the incoming tide.  Very few tracks are permanent  – or is the opposite true?  Now that I’ve written that, I’m not sure it is …. but anyway the big gulls breakfasting on this fresh barracouta or similar fish LL waited patiently nearby for me to pass, and will have picked the bones clean by now if the incoming tide and other people walking along the beach didn’t defeat them!

I’m glad I had my camera.  The water was relatively calm and so clear, that as the tide turned  over the shallow sand their intersecting patterns could be clearly seen in the early morning sun.