News you can use
News you can use
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I don’t know why so many of my life’s lessons seem to require humiliation. Learning has always come easily to me, book learning, that is. And in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think book learning counts for all that much. My school reports consistently lined out the A’s and the comportment side matched. Yes, I was one of those. I’ll not soon forget my dad’s disappointment at my first B+ in freshman high school algebra. I was pleased and relieved with that B+. It could ha...
I crawled into bed early, barely darkish. Wasn’t feeling great. My stomach/intestines were slightly crampy, nothing dire, just not my usual cast-iron gut. Went to sleep with clear conscience. Woke up to wind that sounded like a freight train going through a tunnel at mach one speed, bending trees, flattening crops. Lightning flashed messages of doom across the black sky. I got up and closed my last open window, grabbed another blanket and tried to curl back into sleep. The h...
I woke in the night reciting lines from WWI poet Alan Seeger’s, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Where did that come from? “At some disputed barricade, When spring comes back with rustling shade, And apple blossoms fill the air … .” I haven’t heard that poem since high school. How could I have remembered? Ironically, I’ve never felt more intensively alive than today. Getting a new hip last winter literally gave me a new life. I’ve always liked the rain but this morning when...
Michelle and Ana, up the road in Oconahua, tagged the name “Gringolandia” onto our enclave and it stuck. Though there has never been a dozen of us in residence at any one time, we are the closest thing to a North American colony in the greater Etzatlan municipality. As of Friday, there are now three of us pale-faces in residence in Gringolandia. Lani has returned from four-and-a-half months up north. I won’t see her until she has hidden away for the requisite two weeks. Janet...
Kathy said that she told Crin they should ask Josue to put locks on their closets because I am out of control with my sewing machine. Once my creative juices begin flowing in a particular direction, they run like a river. Innocent beginnings. I cleaned out my closet of the old and worn and stained and unloved garments, shoved them into a trash bag. The next day I retrieved two blouses and cut away parts and pieces to construct face masks. Next, I took a hard critical look at w...
Several years ago, while I still lived in Washington, I visited Dad in Harlem. It was during the last days when my step-mom was still able to do simple things for herself. She put the meal on the table. She was never a good cook. She’d raised 11 children and her meals were made to feed hungry bellies. Nothing was thrown away, ever. I don’t remember the meal. Certainly a meat, potatoes, perhaps a cabbage slaw since it was toward the end of Dad’s garden. But I will never forge...
I woke up with yellow eyeballs. The color was not quite glow-in-the-dark neon yellow, but definitely, the whites of my yes sported a sickly yellowish cast, gunked with matter. In lieu of a thermometer, I felt my Ford-bumper with the back of my hand. Felt normal to me. All systems functioning. Next I did what any modern person with access to internet knows not to do but does it despite themselves. I consulted Dr. Google. “What causes yellow eyes, O Great Oracle?” Frankly, I d...
Now and then, I am reminded how utterly unimportant I am. Sometimes a nudge from memory. Or a “knowing” I’d forgotten. Being alone as much as I am with only a couple flesh-and-blood people to talk with, face-to-face with appropriate two meter social distance, I have a tendency to be inward. Self-centered is the better term. I begin to think my thoughts are important, that they matter. When people are around, I voice my thoughts and friends laugh at me, put me in my place...
Last week I forbade, with wagging finger, I forbade Leo, our Rancho gardener who mothers all of us oldsters, to get sick. The next day Leo landed in the hospital. No, he does not have the virus. But we all had a frightening couple days while Leo was sent to a specialist in Guadalajara for advanced imaging. That’s doctor-speak for a second guess. Leo’s got the rocks, as they say it here in Mexico. The doc said it will pass. The gall stone giving him such pain is tiny and sho...
The week has been filled with emails sailing back and forth between myself and my friends in the States and in Canada. We each are settling into a way of living that might be our new norm for months, even longer. It had been on my mind a long while, since I’m the only northerner on the rancho, to write a group letter lining out my own boundaries for safety during this COVID pandemic. Sooner or later, people will come filtering back. Rather than address them one at a time, I t...
Life is such a mixed bag of tricks, isn’t it? In the morning we slide out of bed, make coffee, check the obits to see if we made headlines, put our two hands (some of us are greedy) in the bag and pull out the tricks of the day. Such a mix. Michelle from Oconahua up the road wrote, “Ana’s Mom was hilarious. Always cracking people up in town. She was quite the outspoken young person, the youngest and last of 18. She was the favorite of her father. He was a strict and hones...
In quiet desperation, this morning I joined the ranks of those who cut their own hair. Using nail scissors. I do not recommend it. If anyone should ask, I’ll say my favorite hairdresser trimmed it — she’s blind and used a machete. Wind sifts a daily cup of dust through the screens into my casita during these dry days. I scan the sky for clouds, an exercise in futility, while grabbing the mop for the frequent cleanup. I vigorously shake the mop before I take it inside the h...
Outside my big front gate, the one used for truck delivery and such, a clump of lantana took root voluntarily. Lantana wears one of the world’s most beautiful flowers, like rings on its fingers, small circles of purple, pink, yellow, with an orange center. Lantana, an invasive weed, can grow taller than me, and will fill the entire yard if left to its own devices. Back when I had asked for lantana, David at Vivero Centro only shook his head, raised eyebrows and muttered s...
He’s not feral. I assume the stranger is a him. He’s not a rack of bones. He yowled around beneath my bedroom windows three nights before I glimpsed him in his white coat with yellow patches. Voice like a diesel tractor with defective brakes. I know why he’s hanging out in the neighborhood. Janet, my next door neighbor, just a few feet over that-away, brought five felines (all fixed) with her when she and Tom moved here from Washington a few months ago to become more-...
One must make one’s own decision, must do what each figures is best for self and family and community. As for me and many of my friends, we choose to continue staying home, having no touchy-feely (sigh) communication with others. We are retired. It is easier for us to hole up, to forego the little extras, the advantages of modern life to which we’ve become accustomed, as if those things are our due. Have any of you elders noticed how living this pared-down life in sel...
As soon as I heard the smoke-belching diesel truck rumble off the highway into the Rancho, I grabbed pruning shears and artfully poked around in a pot of lavender on the front patio. Well, I haven’t been off the ranch in two months. I don’t get to see many people. There are generally three men, sometimes four, swinging our garbage cans or lawn bags into the maw of the beast. They are friendly. They are young and strong. They wave. They greet me, “Buenos dias.” I wave and gri...
“I want to be 14 again and ruin my life differently,” Kathy told me. After that surprising statement Kathy wriggled past elaborating further than a mumble about kisses with a fellow cellist at music camp. Harkening back to when I was 14, all I could think was “Ewww.” Way back then, “He looked at me,” would have put me, a late bloomer, in a dreamy swoon. Kathy a long-time friend, is stuck in Canada, as we all are stuck-in-place for an indeterminate while. I’d say her life is i...
Though not the least bit dangerous, Argentine Ants win the grand prize for pesky, irritating, prolific and impossible to be squashed with any permanence. You in the North Country don’t have to worry about them. So far they have learned to inhabit only tropical and sub-tropical climes. I say ‘so far’. Adaptable little creatures they are. They neither bite with fire nor leave welts. They don’t strip entire trees overnight. They don’t chew the furniture. However, one this mome...
We have numerous ways of fooling ourselves; at least I have. Little things, like “A change is as good as a rest” for when I get bogged down on a project. Or, “If I take a walk, I will no longer want to piggy the rest of the liter of ice cream.” Good luck with that one. In the interest of changing up my daily routine, this morning I put on my green dress. This is not just any green dress. This is an elegant green dress. It flows in simple lines all the way to my feet. The fab...
I am unhinged. This morning my daughter sent me a picture of a lap blanket she bought me. I am in tears. The blanket, purple and turquoise, with feathers and butterflies and such, is beautiful. Beautiful. You know who uses lap blankets? Old women, that’s who! Old women! A few days ago I had another birthday. The good news is that this morning I woke up still alive and grateful. The other side of that coin feels like a slap in the face. These last couple weeks have been hard. I...
Occasionally I pick up one of the classics in literature for a re-reading. I don’t recall what prompted me; it wasn’t the virus. Several weeks ago, in the interests of perusing a translation I’d not read, I chose the Ignatius Bible. The Bible is a daunting big book. I begin at the beginning. Granted, I skim the genealogies and speed through pages of dietary laws and building codes. But otherwise, I read a few pages at a time, slowly, pondering. That Moses is quite the dude....
It must have been the winter of ’65-’66. I was pregnant with Dee Dee, who was born in April. Harvey and I lived on the ranch south of Dodson. A mile-long dirt drive with three “farmer gates” of barbed wire strung onto diamond willow sticks separated us from the highway, only three more miles from town. That grim winter we were snowed in for 90 days straight. Every day of that time our thermometer on the post registered below zero. Wind drifted each snowfall until packed...
Now that I gained your attention, I confess, I have not a clue. Neither to survival nor to sanity. I’m fishing for answers. I figured if I cast out a line, I might hook you and you could tell me! Self-quarantine and social distance. You’d think they would be my old normal since that is pretty much my life during the summer months when my snow-bird neighbors return to the north-country. Yet I went through the same patterns of ups and downs as my friends reported. We found the...
How quickly we progressed from refusing hugs and handshakes, to isolating in voluntary quarantine. In the mornings when Leo came to work our gardens, he calls out, “Sondrita, are you alive.” “Just a minute, let me check. Breathing? Yes, Heart beating? Yes. I’m alive.” Our governor of Jalisco has asked everybody to stay home for five days, to help “flatten the curve.” How quickly we learn the new language. Will everybody stay home? Of course not. For those of us who are “of a...
It’s probably been centuries since our world has been so united in purpose. We are concerned — concerned for our own health, our families, our neighbors, concerned for those around the other side of the globe. A few weeks ago I bought tickets for a quick trip to Glendive. Let me modify that — there is no quick trip into Montana from Central Mexico. I bought tickets for the long trip, short stay. I felt I had little choice since on my birthday, my Montana Driver’s License...
