FLASHBACK NUMBER ONE - ¡Quinceañera! (Part One)

Since the day I arrived in Costa Rica, I´ve heard about one event more than any other: the upcoming quinceañera of Fernanda, my host sister.  If you´ve never heard of a quinceañera, think wedding without a groom, or, if you´re from the old south, debutante party.  At fifteen, girls here get to be the princess of a huge party celebrating their coming of age, complete with an enormous cake, a court of 14 girls and their escorts, a principal table, toasts, and first dances.   It´s pretty wild, and I was beside myself to get to be a part of it. Even better was the timing - my mom and brother were down in Costa Rica visiting for the new year, and their trip overlapped with the party!

In the days leading up to the big event, the Chinchilla farm was a crazy flurry of activity. Arriving from Dominical to celebrate Christmas with the family, I was immediately and happily thrown into the mix of helping prepare.  Luz and I scrubbed her husbands old house from top to bottom using laundry detergent, brooms, and liberal hosing down. (I will never get tired of the taboo feeling I get from being allowed to spray a hose at the inside wall of a house. I want tile floors in my own house just so I can one day do this.) I chopped enough carrots into half moons to fill an entire refridgerator crisper drawer. We polished and decorated 30 champagne flutes, reminicsed about the older daughter´s party as we reworked her decorations and imagined how they would once again be reworked for Daniela.  We hauled some thirty mattresses, blankets, and pillows into the newly cleaned and de-batted house for incoming guests.  We made cookies and baked sweet tamal.  And the guests began to slowly trickle in. Each day, the excitement about the party inched higher and more faces showed up to lend a hand.  Lucky for me, those faces soon included my mom and brother. :)

On the day of the party, both preparation and excitement reached a critical mass.  I went early to the party site with my mom, Luz, and a big handful of other helpers to bedeck the place with as much purple and pink as it could handle, and then returned to bedeck myself in party gear for the first time since I´d left the country.  After months of baggy work pants and technical tees, my lacy dress and flashy heels felt beyond bizarre.  Luz and I giggled at one another in our finery - we´d gotten pretty used to only seeing each other in scrubby work clothes. But complete with my new digs, a fresh haircut, and the first make up to touch my face in weeks, I felt scrubbed clean and ready to go.