So, as I was saying last week before we ran out of time, you get your ladders and your paints and your brushes and a couple of rags. You also need a yogurt container of water because -- and this is very important -- there is no water yet in your fountain!
You paint for a little while, until you get hungry. You go inside and have a half a carton of cottage cheese (which is so delicious in Mexico) and take a picture.
You paint for six hours. Then you look at your wall and have a conniption fit because it is so awful. You sulk and cuss and go to bed that night convinced you have wasted an entire day and will now have to repaint the whole wall in a solid color with a normal roller and forget this whole stupid idea.
The next morning, you skulk downstairs, avoiding looking in the direction of the fountain wall outside the living room window. You have several cups of tea to steel yourself. Then you go take a look. Huh, you say to yourself. It's not quite as bad this morning as it was last night. Let's just start messing around with it and see if it's totally hopeless or not.
Up the ladder you go. Five hours later, you stand back. You pick up a brush again and add a bit of paint here, a bit there. You wipe some of it off with the rag, which now has a lovely impressionist look to it. You admire the rag for a while. You dab some more colors on the wall. You stand back, then spend another hour adding some more color here, some more there.
You wander into the kitchen and open a cold cerveza, just to allow the paint to dry a bit, because you've had another idea.
You go get the wax you bought at Comex to make your wall lamps look aged. Although you are somewhat pooped by now, you climb back up that ladder and smear the brown wax all over everything, then wipe it back off, leaving some of the wax behind in the deep parts of the plaster finish.
Hmmm. Getting closer...maybe just a few more hazes of color up there and down here...
By now, it's been over seven hours, and it's time to clean up and go out to Panchito's for a visit and a break.
The next morning, you wake up a little bit excited. You barely finish a cup of tea before you start applying the purple that Jesús, the genius paint-mixing child down at the Prisa store on the corner, figured out how to get just right after nobody else could. It doesn't take all that long, which is good, because it's Easter Sunday and you want to spend the afternoon at the beach.
Now you have to wait a few days, as Jesús insists there is only one epoxy-type paint that you can use on the inside of the fountain, even though Lupe put on a coat of sealer. But you've learned to trust Jesús in matters of paint. So he orders it from somewhere.
Finally, it comes, and he's had it mixed to exactly the color you wanted, and of which he approved. You spend an hour or two mixing and applying it, bent over double and headfirst into the fountain, which would make you very dizzy even if you weren't inhaling epoxy fumes the whole time. Whoof.
A couple of days later, after the paint has cured and during which you went out and bought some papyrus and some pots, you turn on the hose. The fountain begins to fill. You go pot the papyrus and come back. The fountain seems no fuller than it was when you left. Uh-oh. You reach in and push down the bathtub style plug at the bottom. It definitely seems to fill faster when it's not simultaneously draining.
You put some of your water plants in there.
When the water is deep enough to cover the submersible pump, you try all the switches on the wall until you figure out which one might actually turn it on. The motor starts to hum...but nothing happens. You count to ten...and the water starts to flow.
Real quick, you put another plant in a hanging pot you bought in Tonalá and hang it on the screw Esteban put in the wall yesterday.
Then you try the submersible light, and it works, too.
Well, can you beat that! you say to yourself. I think it's done!
And it turns out that it is.
(...except for more landscaping, and the free-form mosaic on the front curve of the basin, which I'll get to eventually (see math formula in last week's Part 1)...)
P.S. As far as colors go, they're going to look different on everyone's monitor, so I'd have to suggest you just come on by one of these days and take a look!
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Next week we'll take a peek at Día de Las Madres, Mother's Day in Mexico, which seems to last a week, as well it should.
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