June's Nursery

03/09/2026

01/09/2026

Every Guyanese child has been warned off a mushroom by an adult who refused to explain why. 🍄

Jumbie umbrella. They come up overnight after heavy rain, pale and thin, standing in wet grass at the foot of a tree or in the corner of the yard where the sun never properly reaches. By evening there is a little crowd of them where there was absolutely nothing that morning, and that is exactly the problem. Anything that arrives that fast, with nobody planting it and nobody watering it, was clearly not put there for us.

The rules were never written down anywhere. You do not pick them. You do not carry one inside the house. If you kick them over you do it walking away, and you certainly do not sit down near them after dark. Some people said they marked ground where somebody was buried a long time ago. Some said the jumbies stood under them to keep out of the rain, which is a strange enough thing to picture and stranger still to be told when you are six years old and barefoot in the grass. 🌧️

The science is dull enough. Fungus, wet season, rotting wood somewhere under the surface. But the name held on for a reason, because nobody in this country looks at a ring of pale mushrooms in a dark yard and thinks about biology first. What did the older people in your house tell you about jumbie umbrella, and did you believe them?

01/09/2026

Happy new month

29/08/2026

26/08/2026

In a lot of Guyanese homes, Christmas did not begin with food. It began with somebody deciding the entire house had to be turned upside down. 🎄

Weeks out, the plan started. New curtains, because the old ones had done their year. Floors scrubbed and varnished or polished until you could see yourself in the boards, at which point you were forbidden from walking on them. Walls painted. Cushion covers changed. The furniture pushed into the middle of the room under an old sheet, the good glasses taken down and washed even though nobody had touched them since last Christmas. Children were handed a rag and a task and told, quite correctly, that they were helping.

Nobody could fully explain the rule, but everybody followed it. The house had to be new for the new year. Whatever was cracked got fixed or thrown out. Whatever was faded got replaced. Part of it came from a belief that how you enter a year is how you will spend it, and part of it came from something simpler, because people were going to visit, and people were going to look.

Then Christmas morning arrived and it was all done. Curtains hanging stiff and bright, floor shining, pepperpot on the stove, and the smell of fresh paint mixing with the smell of black cake. That particular combination is one of the strongest memories a lot of us carry around, and there is nowhere you can go to buy it. ✨

Was your family the new curtains type or the fresh coat of paint type, and how early did the cleaning start?

23/08/2026

🚨𝐑𝐔𝐍 𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐘 𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍🚨

Please help us find Chrispin Lampkin.

If you have any information, please contact the nearest police station or call 911.

22/08/2026

It's raining
Outside nice and cool.