Writing is a form of therapy

As I have said several times, writing is therapy.

After sharing with you how I felt back in Colombia, that last column helped me to put my ideas in the right place and in a way that relieved my feelings.

These days I feel more comfortable, somehow we have been able to rest more, and we have visited family and some friends we haven't seen for more than two years, which is a refreshment for the soul. I am still in the last weeks of the semester of studies, a responsibility that has not allowed me to feel completely rested, but now it is time to take a final breath and finish in the best possible way.

A few days ago, I talked to my sister, and she told me that her husband bought macadamia nuts for her daughter (my niece). She told me that they taught her to break the macadamias and that she was very judicious about it as if she had been given a great responsibility. Macadamias are a type of nut that comes covered by a hard shell; it is very common in the coffee states to go to the fruit and vegetable market and find them packed in green nets hung in the stores. My memories with macadamias must be at least two decades old; those were when my mom used to buy them and take them to my sister and me. I remember that my mom and dad taught my sister and me how to eat macadamias; eating them is not difficult; it's like eating anything, you put it in your mouth, chew, enjoy, swallow, and that's it. Instead, they taught us how to open them because you must break the hard shell covering them.

So how do you open macadamias? Well, these days, there are special devices to break the shell, usually known as nut splitters, other people open them with pliers, but we were taught a different way. The streets, as is typical in many places, have cracks; well, it is those cracks that we were taught to use to open the macadamias. It is straightforward. First, you get a stone big enough to crack the macadamia; second, you place the macadamia in one of the cracks in the street so that when you hit it, it doesn't fly anywhere; third, you hit it with the stone once or a couple of times until you crack or break the shell entirely, take out the macadamia and eat it. It's that easy.

The intention of this column is not to be a tutorial on how to crack macadamias without a nutcracker but rather to share with you that I was very nostalgic when my sister told me that they bought macadamias for my niece and taught her how to crack them, just as our parents had taught us. It may border on the ridiculous, but I remember it was days ago, not decades ago, when my sister and I would sit on the street and finish the whole bag of macadamias. I still find it hard to believe that our children are now beginning to inherit this and many other of our customs.

For now, let me tell you something: I want to split macadamias.