Red sweetcorn and downey bound

if these red sweetcorn things don’t poison us first… I’ve seen them used decoratively, but Drsita just picked up 6 from Lucky’s and 4 of them were red.

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Wish us luck.

(Post-prandial EDIT)

They’re not as tasty as the yellow ones, but apparently according to several wise Mexican friends on flickr, they make great tortillas…

Abuela desde Guanatos sent me a whole myth about them, I’ve been translating all afternoon so while I’m in the mood…

It all happened before the Spanish arrived, when the earth belonged to those who worked on it, when nobody fought to live, because living was easy, and men were happy just to sleep, eat, love and grow.

In this particular year there was much happiness. The rains had fallen in abundance; the moon had illuminated the crops.

The Indians sowed the grains of sweetcorn, as white as a girl’s teeth on the well-ploughed earth

A few days later, the ground was covered with little green shoots which grew and grew as they drank up the water.

The goddess Sucuxi, so beautiful, so pure, so good, pondered the work of the Indians from the hill and wanted to reward their efforts by giving them the biggest harvest.

Susuxi came down from the hills to the sweetcorn fields, whose leaves blew in the wind. Thorns pierced the brown soles of Susuxi’s feet and from them fell red droplets of blood.

The goddess fled back to her house, dripping blood onto the kernels of a sweetcorn cob.

The kernels drank up the blood and turned red, as red as the blood they had drank.

Days passed… and the Indians harvested…

The strangest thing: They found a sweetcorn with red kernels.

Spanish source

The story lacks closure. Like then the next day the conquistadors arrived or something… and also maybe kernel’s not the right word, but I’ve been installing ubuntu all afternoon on my laptop…

Anyroad, there’s a blog post for you. They’ll be scarce again this week, no internets yet in Downey we’re told.