News you can use
News you can use
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Rain fell all night long. The ground was soggy, spongy. Flowers hung their heads from weight of water. The morning sky looked like moldy cottage cheese. Around noon, the sun broke through with promise. Every morning I take a small basket out to my mango tree and fill it with what wants to be picked. Today I put another quart of mango pieces in my wee fridge-freezer. It is jam-packed, literally, since I made two batches of freezer jam and the remainder of the space is...
Hurricane Estelle blew in lugging a heavy cloud blanket behind her until the sky looked like cry me a river. Day after day after day, darkness reigned and time warped, smudged and dripped down the mountain walls like Dali-esque clocks. If one took the sky and flattened it out like a topographical map, it would be criss-crossed by rivers cascading off the edges in waterfalls. (Flat sky, flat earth, what’s the difference!) Under cover of day as dark as nightfall, somebody sneake...
Yes, it’s a great place to live (for me) but you wouldn’t want to visit. I’ve been accused of having a Paradise Complex, but it is not true. I’ve been told Paradise is full of snakes and liars and have no reason to either believe it or not believe it. Nope. I live in a dusty little cow-town, farm village in Mexico and though I often say I live in Paradise, I mean Paradise for me. For me. Amen. And Awomen. When Dr. Landazari, eye specialist, who lives in Mazatlan, the Pearl of...
Why do memories come to visit, often at inopportune times? I’ve questions but no answers. I distinctly remember once telling a minimalist friend how much I admired her way of life. An entire bare wall with one picture. A vase with one sprig of flower. “But I know me. I couldn’t be minimalist in my surroundings. I like it. I just can’t do it.” My home was never cluttered. But wherever one cast one’s eyes, one would find a vignette of simple beauty. That’s my passion. Maki...
One day in the far distant future, back when I was God, time is relative, one of my very intelligent earth persons proved that, but more will be revealed, anyway, one day one of my other earth persons requested a visit. Which I granted. I set up times for personal visitation, one hour in the early morning and one hour late at night, since most hours in between, I seem to be out of sight, out of mind. I quite like visitation. No matter whom I am scheduled to see, visitation is...
Yesterday, I took a deep breath and offered my services for a job, for which not only am I ill-prepared, but in my deep heart-of-hearts, I know I cannot do. This will seem like nothing to you but to me it is a BIG DEAL. I offered to go to Glendive to fill in as secretary for my daughter until she could hire somebody adequate to her needs. See? I knew you would say, “So what?” Back when I was in high school (early ’60s) the career opportunities for women were sorely limit...
I suppose you’ve all heard about the latest horror disease, monkey pox? Evidently, this near cousin to small pox is transmitted by bodily contact. I want you to know I’ve sworn off sex with monkeys. Not that monkeys are an issue in my life. Nor is the other. I’d no more than digested that bit of breaking news when my friend Kathy informed me Canada is proposing to print a health warning on every individual cigarette. Yep, my reaction too. My mind boggles. Beyond a healthy gigg...
Rainy season has arrived early. Hooray! Hooray! Evening rains revive this parched mountain valley. Trees tilt their sombreros when I walk by. When one hasn’t seen rain in nine months, the typical gestation period one might think, each raindrop is a birthing. A renewal. New life. Figuratively and literally. And I laid claim to my Baby Rain, took credit for bringing it about all by myself. I’m human, OK? It may sound silly but it is the way I felt, wet, standing out in the rai...
Not many of us will remember, well, because not many of us were around, in 1938 in New Jersey when Orson Welles adapted the H. G. Wells classic, “The War of the Worlds” for a special Halloween radio broadcast over the “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” Since the story of Martians invading earth seemed too silly and too improbable, more suitable for comic books, Welles asked his writers to gussy it up a bit, give it some bells and whistles. What they came up with was a minute-...
I’ve been called ditzy more than once over the years. I’m going to share something I ordinarily would keep to myself because it rather proves the point. Maybe I really am ditzy. I don’t mind. If a thought lazes through my mind several times over a few days, weaving its way into consciousness, I’ve finally learned to pay attention. I’ve been sensing that a retreat would be good. I’d been feeling a little out of balance, especially since my knee was body-slammed near a mont...
My world is all I have to share. My world is ordinary. It is not much of a gift. Since it is all I have to give, I gladly welcome you through my doorway. Take today. I got up on the “wrong side of bed” so to speak. Instead of getting up when I woke up, I let myself go back to sleep “for just a few minutes.” It’s not like I have a schedule. When I did get out of bed, much later, I felt like I was living in a vat of molasses in January, every movement forced through a fugue sta...
Two weeks ago, a shepherd dog running full speed body slammed into my knee. Maiming me was not Chebella’s intent. She was fleeing from my Lolita, half her size, but in full protect-my-mistress mode. Size means nothing in dog world. Lola still quivers, after all these months, when Snowball, an ancient, tottering mini-poodle, growls when we walk past her people. No bones were broken. The doc sent me home to bed and chair. The first week flowed rather smoothly. Leo showed up e...
Any person raised on the Montana plains knows how precious is every sprout, blade or leaf of green. Precious. We baby each new evidence of life, coddle it, rejoice when it survives the season. Living here in central Mexico with year-round green, flowers, fruits, one learns to do differently. I had to discover how to prune all manner of precious greenery before they morphed into Audrey, the blood-sucking terror from “Little Shop of Horrors” and took over my whole garden wor...
Yesterday the four of us women who are here on the rancho went to Oconahua to share pot luck with Ana and Michelle, and to meet Michelle’s sister Janice. My neighbor Janet and I have been to their home several times. This was the first for Kathy and Crinny, so it was really special for them to see the lovely and incredible stone house that Ana and Michelle built over 11 years. We each introduced ourselves to Janice, me being last in line. “Hi, Janice. I’m so delighted to me...
Unfortunately, I have friends stuck in a spite fight. As is often the case, one party is bewildered while the other party is self-righteously sticking pins in voodoo dolls, metaphorically speaking. I’m the onlooker. There is nothing I can do but watch it unfold. I feel sad. I know about spite. And I know who spite hurts. Not so much the intended victim, who often is unaware. My first clear and vivid memory of my own spiteful action occurred when I was five or six years old. M...
Remember those words from long ago? I glance at tee-shirts on computer side-bar ads, and see that phrases from when I was young and innocent, or at least oblivious, our phrases are making a comeback. So go with the flow even if you’ve no idea what it means. I remember during a particularly tough few years when my mantra (I didn’t know the word mantra back then) was “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.” I thought if I said it often enough the words would magical...
In the space of a few days I’ve transformed from a hermit grub to social butterfly. It all began when John and Carol invited me to please, please, please join them for a lunch before they headed off into the sunrise back to Minnesota. I had turned down numerous such invitations during these last months, just not comfortable being out in the greater community. When you come to visit we will take you to spend an afternoon walking the grounds of the Hacienda del Carmen, a b...
Birds: Karen from Floweree reported to our girl-group that she heard her first meadowlark singing from atop a fencepost in her garden. We who no longer live in Montana sighed as the meadowlark’s unmistakable and beautiful song rang in our refreshed memories. Here in Jalisco, as everywhere else in spring, the skies crisscross with bird travel, some heading north, some arriving to build nests in which to plant new baby birdy eggs. Especially in early morning and late afternoon,...
Was it Mark Twain who said that any two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead? I have a secret, but it is too good not to share. But I’ll only tell you. So get a mug of coffee and pull up a chair to the table. But before I spill my guts, let me tell you the backstory. In 1966, when my daughter was a baby in diapers, I lived on a small ranch south of Dodson. We had electricity. That is important because a lot of our neighbors were not hooked up to the flick of a switc...
I just saw the most marvelous little creature clinging to a hand towel out on my clothesline. I’ve no idea what it is, have never seen anything quite like it. Wondering what it could be, I lightly brushed it with my fingertips and it spread out, moved a few steps and settled down again. The body is much like a walking stick, wings closely tucked. Spread out, the wings appeared silvery gray, a lacy, gossamer delicacy. At the tip of each wing was a more defined, darker, s...
My human asked me to write the column today. She begged, pleaded, and to my shame, she groveled. She also gave me a beef bone with tatters of meat from the carniceria in town. I caved. I told her, I am a dog, “The story I tell will be incomprehensible to human kinds.” She said, “That’s OK. Anything I wrote today wouldn’t make sense either.” She then told me that she is feeling way down in the dumps. Lower level. I don’t understand. Isn’t being down in the dumps a good th...
We sing the praises and glories of spring. Really, we ought to be more careful. Spring ought to come printed with a warning label, beware, danger of erratic behavior. Spring is warm and wanton with promise one day, and cruel and cold, withholding favors the next day, spurning all pleading and imploring with an imperious frosty demeanor. Like many things, Spring also has a use-by date and just like that, go to sleep one night much like any other, waken and summer has arrived....
I thought long and hard before taking on the responsibility of adopting a pooch. Lola has proven to be an asset to my life. If nothing else, she gets me out the door several times a day for short walks, for little chats, for daily interactions. She’s taught me when she wants to be brushed, when she wants a walk-about, when she wants her belly scratched, that sort of thing. My neighbors, Josue and Erika, have two small poochies, Snowball, aged and toothless, and Princess, w...
My friend Cheryl, a former high school classmate, was talking with our “girl-group” this week. She expressed how all her life, when among certain gifted, professional, highly recognized and extremely wealthy people, she has felt inadequate. Haven’t we all felt that way? Isn’t that a universal feeling, to feel like whoever we are, whatever the circumstances, we are not enough? Is it just me, or have we all at times felt like frauds and if people find out, oh, my, what shall w...
I’m not the least bit enamored with “the good ol’ days,” which, to my mind, were rather rugged. Hard, one might say. I suppose every age is hard in its own way. You might think I’m crazy and perhaps you are right. A few months ago I was standing over the ironing board, dealing with the aftermath of cotton clothing sun-dried on the clothesline, letting all kinds of thoughts ramble through my mind when it seemed as if some of my notions coalesced into a decision without consulti...
