El Arco Norte

Rejoice! There is now a Mexico City bypass. Until five months ago, we on the Pacific side of Mexico had to drive through the western hemisphere’s largest metropolitan area to get pretty much anywhere east or south of it. And it wasn’t easy.

We recently headed for Xalapa in the state of Veracruz. We checked online for the day the last digit of our license plate would forbid us to pass through Mexico City, slept in Toluca and mounted the assault the next morning. It was a good passage with only one stop to ask directions and was accomplished in about an hour. In fact, it was spectacularly good because, when we got gas on the far side at about 10:30, we learned about an additional rule: No out-of-state cars on the road until 11. The last time we made a mistake, it took 2000 pesos to get out of it.

While in Xalapa word came to us of the bypass, El Arco Norte, and we took it going home. Here’s how:

East-West. Past Puebla you exit the main highway at Texmelucan where it’s almost well marked. A warning sign says El Arco Norte; the actual turnoff says Hwy 57 to Querétaro. At an un-manned toll plaza you eventually figure out to push a button and take a plastic card. The route, through beautiful, sparsely populated countryside north of Mexico City, proceeds past a turnoff to Pachuca, past a turnoff to Querétaro, and on to the exit at Atlacomulco where you pay 340 pesos. Atlacomulco is located at the point where the highway from Guadalajara turns south toward Toluca.

West-East. The exit is not marked “El Arco Norte” but there’s an Atlacomulco exit sign and another that indicates it’s the road to Querétaro.

The route takes about an hour more than going through Toluca and Mexico City but I estimate that the relaxation will add about four days to your life expectancy.

Another San Pancho Writer Breaks Out

One of our number, Ellen Greene, published a wonderful book called Remember the Sweet Things (William Morrow/HarperCollins) in 2009, and now I’ve followed her with The Lives of La Escondida (Lirio, 2011.) When we started our writers’ group several years ago, publishing was only a gleam in our eyes, though we were all serious about our “craft” and a couple of us had books in the works. I think both Ellen and I would say that our writing group was catalytic in our writing process.

Things are strange in the book world these days. Barry Eisler (writer of bestseller thrillers) turned down a $500,000 advance in favor of self-publishing on Amazon’s CreateSpace after a hard look at the bottom line. Considering that an advance is, by definition, to be paid back from royalties; that book royalties from publishing houses run in the 10-15% range, while you’ll get more like 40% if you self-publish—with the disparity even greater for the e-version—the math was clearly in favor of the Indie approach.

Of course, Eisler was already well known and has no need for the book tours and all the other publicity efforts of the established publishing houses. Oops, make that the book tours, etc. that used to be part of the package at the established houses. Now, times are tough, and HarperCollins belongs to Rupert Murdoch.

And those traditional houses accept manuscripts only through literary agents, and agents take a hefty percentage, too, if you can land one, which I hadn’t when I stopped trying. I stumbled upon a publisher that would accept author submissions. I submitted; I was accepted! But if something seems too good to be true… After nearly two years of dealing with rank amateurs—extending to their knowledge, or lack thereof, of grammar and punctuation, and a refusal to allow the book to appear in e-form—I extricated myself from my contract.

What’s more, the publisher was going to print my book using CreateSpace, and then give me 10%. Sure, he provided me an editor—whose work I couldn’t use—and a proof-reader—who wouldn’t consider even the Chicago Manual of Style (“We aren’t in Chicago.”) Those, if competent, are worth a lot. However, the publisher wasn’t paying these people—thus justifying his percentage. They were working for royalties, too, and their work was slow since these weren’t their day jobs, which they should never consider quitting.

So, like Barry Eisler, I published on CreateSpace, and I make about two dollars more per book than Kathryn Stockett gets for The Help. (It won’t be necessary for you to point out who is likely making more money.) For fees, CreateSpace will edit, proof, or design, but you may do it all yourself virtually free of charge. And, if there are tricky bits, there is also prompt and competent tech support. For ten dollars, one can have an ISBN attached to a publishing house of one’s own—mine is named Lirio, from Casa de los Lirios, my San Pancho home.

My book is a romance that violates some of the conventions, hopefully making my characters more lifelike, while still devastatingly appealing. I based it in New Mexico where I lived for thirty-seven years, and in Mexico, too. There, in the 1590s, the Inquisition drove suspected Jews north to New Mexico where they went underground and hang on until this day. The book is available on Amazon and in all e-reader forms, as described on my webpage: www.carolynkingson.com.

Tlacuaches Trumped

Opossoms, (tlacuaches, in Spanish), find my San Pancho home agreeable, as I’ve complained in several posts. Yes, they can have some bad habits, such as chewing through the gas line to my stove and causing an explosion, but I’ve now achieved perspective. My daughter found baby-blues to be too much, my grandbaby beckoned, and I’ve moved to London for a time to be what help I can. And it is London that has opened my eyes.

And how has London, more precisely, Chiswick, done this? Chiswick with its meandering streets, some of which probably follow old cow paths; where dropped items hang on fences until reclaimed; dense with prams and nannies and lovingly tended gardens; home of Colin Firth, for crissakes—is infested with foxes. Walk home after dark, gaze out into the garden early in the morning, and you’re sure to see them starting out on the night’s business or heading back to the den, which is probably hidden under a garden buddleia, maybe yours. But don’t think they aren’t out in the day, too. These foxes look as though they have no need of “sly” or “wily;” those traits were apparently given up as unnecessary long ago. A better epithet would be “arrogant as a fox.” They don’t slink or skulk home in the grey-green morning light. These animals are alpha, top, apex predators. And I’m not overlooking humans.

I say without fear of contradiction that everyone in the UK knows that a fox entered an east London house, went upstairs, and mauled twin baby girls in their crib—one on the face. When the screams brought the parents running, they found the fox sitting as calmly as if it were the family dog. It was headline line news when the babies finally got out of the hospital. Tlacuaches would never do anything like that.

Another baby was attacked while sleeping beside its mother on the sofa. The woman whose house I’m staying in found one in her living room with her three-year-old. They regularly tear up my daughter’s garden. Everybody has a story. It’s been hot, but do you think you dare leave open a ground-floor window?

Foxes have a devoted following in England. Fox hunts—“…the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” (Oscar Wilde)—were a target for animal rights advocates for decades and are now banned. One may be arrested for killing or trapping a fox—though, I presume you’d get off lightly if it could, definitively, be shown to have injured your baby. It’s hard to understand why some humane fox removal is not being attempted until you realize that there’s no place in England that isn’t already full of foxes. Given that, one wonders why the men aren’t out with torches and pitchforks at night.

And if it’s not enough that foxes threaten babies, they kill house cats. (In fairness, I note that The National Fox Welfare Society disputes this and says they only chase them away from their kits, or tease them. Italics, and scepticism, mine.) You’d think even a rumour of cat-killing would put the nail in the fox coffin, cats being nearly as essential to human happiness as babies. And while London wrestles with its dilemma, we hold our grandchildren close and think of the mild-mannered tlacuaches of San Pancho.

Tlaquache Terrorism

I wrote a blog entry a couple of years ago about the possum problem in our house and garden; there are certain animal lovers who have not spoken to me since. Though the murder plot didn't come off, there was a lot of premeditation, and for possum offenses no worse than being ugly and waking us up nightly with hisses, rustlings and mating clicks. But now the situation has become worse by several orders of magnitude.
The other night I was minding my own business, heating up some leftovers for dinner on top of the stove. I had just stirred the pot and returned to the living room when the stove exploded. The Le Creuset pot flew up and over the island and landed upside down; the burner apparatus and grills likewise, the oven door blew open and wisps of insulation streamed from the joints. The neighbors came running to see if we were still alive.
Alive, yes, but considerably shaken and also dumbfounded. The oven hadn't been on; I had been cooking daily—now I vowed never to go near the stove again. It wouldn't have been pretty if I had stirred that pot a few moments later than I did. We shut off the gas, cleaned up the mess and went out to dinner. We planned to check out the stoves in the shop on the corner in the morning and when we did, we found a nice one that went better with my dishwasher anyway.
But first we really had to make an inspection. Jonathan pulled the stove out of its slot in the counter. There sat a slightly singed tlaquache in a nest of leaves showing its vicious little teeth—teeth which it had used, in its spare time, to chew through the metal mesh-clad gas line. As a parting insult, when Jonathan drove it out from under the stove, it ran and hid under the dishwasher and he had to disconnect and pull that out, too. The possum finally scurried off into the garden, where, animal lovers, it plots with impunity—for the time being.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

My husband and I recently attended one of the Hay Festivals. In 2010-2011 they are being held in Wales, Cartagena, Beiruit, Kerala, Nairobi, the Maldives, Belfast, Segovia and Zacatecas—conveniently located about nine hours away from our summer home in San Sebastian. Writers, musicians, film makers, scientists, and social entrepreneurs talk, play, screen and inspire; Bill Clinton called it “the Woodstock of the mind.”

The festival was a brilliant experience and the romance of the city couldn’t be missed. A lecture might be held in the Antiguo Templo de San Augustin or in the partially ruined nave of the ex-convento which now houses the Museo Rafael Coronel with it’s collection of 1600 Mexican masks. The open-air concerts, and what perfect high altitude summer air it was, were held in a plaza created by a cluster of colonial jewels. Our hotel, formerly a bishop’s palace, had displayed Morelos’ severed head for two weeks on its tour of Mexico during the Revolution. Other historical sites, templos, museos and ex-conventos crowd the small Centro; we tried to see them all.

At the of the other Coronel brother, Pedro, one of Mexico’s most noted twentieth century artists, the visitor enters through a library. Once belonging to the ex-convento that houses the museum, the library is a grand room, perhaps seventy feet long with sixteen- or eighteen-foot ceilings and high windows set in the thick walls. The upper reaches of the shelves are lost in the dim light and are packed with leather-bound and gold-tooled volumes. We immediately began to see treasures—first editions of Bernal Diaz’s history of the conquest of Mexico and of Prescott’s conquest history in Spanish translation. As other museum goers passed through the library and on to the rest of the collection, we were riveted, exclaiming over and examining every shelf until the distinguished old librarian offered to let us see whatever book we wanted. He extracted whatever we asked for, bringing it to the lectern on the little desk beneath the window and turning the pages for us with his gloved hands.

Then he offered to show us the rest of the library. We passed through a black-curtained arch into another room, even larger, at a right angle to the first, taking up the entire side of the former convent. This room, the librarian explained, contained books from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every one was bound in parchment, discolored and crinkled, with hand-scribed titles on the spines in red and black ink. Then a third room along the back of the convent. Here were books with balsa wood covers and brilliantly marbled end papers, dictionaries, atlases, a facsimile of the Mendocino Codex, one of the few Aztec codices to survive the Spanish bonfires.

All that was a dream experience, but then this: Write out a solicitud, a request, go to the pharmacy and buy a left-over swine flu mask and latex gloves and all this was mine for the examining. I did it. Just another couple of hours, I assured Jonathan, but it took an extra day in Zacatecas before I tore myself away. Ask me what items and how much of them Montezuma received in tribute each year and what a parchment-bound Vulgate Bible feels like, book worm trails and all. I saw a collection of photos (not prints of photos) of Mexican churches taken by Frida Khalo’s father, an engraved map of Mexico City and surrounds when it was in the middle of the lake and reached by causeways and fifteenth century stories of the missionaries who brought Christianity to Ethiopia. I could go on.

One isn’t trusted around rare books in the US. I once (barely) got into the stacks of the Yale University Library even though supervised by my daughter who had access as a student. And the really old and valuable stuff isn’t there anyway, it’s over in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and you aren’t getting in there without a letter of introduction from your academic advisor. Zacatecas is a good place to be reminded of how pleasant a society Mexico can be.

Corazón de Agave

The Pinot Noir my husband is making in San Sebastian needed time in an oak barrel for its finish. He ordered one from a cooper in Tequila and we combined the pick up with touring visitors around the sights. It is a beauty, the barrel, 200 liters, 50 gallons or so, bearing the name of our winery, Las Fincas. The oak comes from Kentucky. If it’s good enough for Mexican tequila it’s good enough for Mexican wine, we say. Besides, I heard they’re cutting down the forest of Fontainebleau outside of Paris for that precious French oak.

Visitors in tow, we toured the Herradura tequila factory. The cores of agave azul, called piñas for their resemblance to a pineapple, are roasted and pressed, the juice fermented and distilled. One always is treated to a taste of the roasted piña on such tours—delicious, smoky-sweet and very fibrous. You are reminded that alcohol comes from sugar. The agave has plenty.

Down the road we stopped by a little table where half a roasted piña was laid out for sale. We were offered the ends of the cut-off spears which were mahogany dark and roasted to caramel perfection. We separated the sweet stuff from the fibers with our teeth just as you’d get the meat off an artichoke leaf. We had already made out purchase when, seemingly as an after-thought, the seller offered us a sample from the piña’s center, its heart, its corazón. It was firmer than the heart of an artichoke but similarly smooth, no fibers. It was even more delicious than the spear ends. We were ravished. I bought a large wedge and began to brain-storm recipes.

First came pork loin cooked and sauced in corazón de agave. In my test kitchen, also known as my kitchen, I wrapped the pork in the fibrous spear-ends, encased it in foil and roasted it slowly. Fibers were strained out, sweetened juices reduced and mellowed with cream, cubes of corazón heated and served beside the meat. Oh, boy.

Then there was corazón de agave pecan pie. I heated two cups of corazón bits with a cup of orange juice and thickened it with flour. Some orange zest for that little edge. After the mixture cooled, I blended it with three beaten eggs and lightly-roasted pecans, poured it into a pie shell and baked it for an hour. Served with cream, it was better than mincemeat.

Now friends are in the act. Lorena made corazón de agave ice cream. Canela proposed mashing it and serving it instead of yams beside the Thanksgiving turkey. Imagine chunks in capirotada, Mexican bread pudding. Feel free.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Gail:

4:30 AM. We are jolted from sleep by the ringing phone. It’s the cordless handset that alerts us to an incoming SKYPE internet call. Instantly awake, we rush to the computer. The number on the screen calms fears, brings annoyance. It’s not family, it’s a long-time customer with equipment problems calling Bill.

When we first came to San Pancho nearly ten years ago, there were only a handful of public telephones scattered around the pueblo. Armed with a stack of phone cards, I would walk from one to the other to find the shortest line. It took two phone cards and a long series of numbers to execute one call. Under pressure, I would inevitably misdial and have to start again. The polite coughs and shuffling feet behind me felt like signs of impatience and that did not make it easier.

Carolyn:

You had it easy, Gail. When we got her fifteen years ago there were two phones and a fax machine in a little hole-in-the-wall a block from the beach. One of the old families was running the business, and it was a life saver. There was a chalk board mounted on the outside wall where your name appeared when you had a fax. If you were awaiting important news you’d be down there every few minutes until your fax arrived.

My husband was trying to have it both ways, keep a software writing job and come to Mexico too. He would take his laptop to the little office and plug it into a phone to download his email. One day, the download went on until his bill was up to 200 pesos (when 200 pesos was real money) and he had to quit. The next, he drove into Vallarta in search of a faster download--no, internet cafes used phone lines there, too, and though they didn’t charge 10 pesos a minute as in San Pancho, the email was still taking too long to come through.

Gail:

Then you understand how excited we were in 2004 when we our house was completed and we could apply for a private line.
“We’re very sorry. No more phone lines are available in San Pancho,” Telmex said. They would put us on the wait list. But the number of people wanting phones had exploded and we ended up waiting two years. The good news was that, by then, we could get broadband, too.

Carolyn:

That was rough. We got our phone when the first twenty private lines were offered, but we were on dial up for a long time.

Gail:

Then SKYPE! We loved it! Then a cell phone tower! Ten year olds in the pueblo had cell phones. Soon we did, too.

Emails—we get lots of them. Many promise eternal happiness if we forward same to 50 of our closest friends and every on-line purchase results in special offers. But my sister gets in touch every morning and we can stay close to family and friends. We pay our bills and read the newspapers on-line, too.

SKYPE calls—we get a lot of them too. Bill’s customers want him to fix their problems. Our sons call with questions about air conditioners and water filtration systems, or when the keys are locked inside the car in a snowstorm. But they also call to check in, to share good news, and to ask Bill for his coconut shrimp recipe.

By the way, Carolyn, did you ever find out what was in that email?

Carolyn:

It turned out to be a video clip of a rhinoceros trying to copulate with a very attractive Volvo.

365 Days of Me Time

Leaving Puerto Vallarta for the drive up the coast to San Pancho, the billboards and banners almost blot out the azure sky. Buy into this! Buy into that! The signs for Los Amores (The Lovers) show an impossibly beautiful couple, retirement age, smiling at each other as though the Viagra shipment has just come in. Another announces: You’ve Been Good—You Deserve It. An older man grins like the cat that got the cream. He deserves that infinity edge pool, those lounge chairs…possibly that swimsuited beauty, too. Life Built Around You. Life! The whole enchilada. Resorts, spas, beach clubs, residences, condominiums—Invest! All this is for people with Lifestyle Addiction. Could that be us? Those ripped bodies outlined by gauzy white cotton in the ocean breeze? We no longer care for the environment, the common good; we’re not our brother’s keepers—it’s 365 Days of Me Time, 24/7.

It was August when I wrote that; now it is December. The sky is an even deeper blue and the temperature has cooled to perfection, but The Crisis has come upon us. On the drive, I count 127 empty billboards. Only a few bother to plead Disponible (Available). About 40 others wait to be put out of their misery, so faded and tattered that their messages are no longer legible. Everybody said they were overbuilding condos…Now, no matter how good you’ve been, perhaps you don’t deserve a second or third home. In fact, you’d better hope you can live on love.

Remembering Doña Conchita

On November 2, at the Day of the Dead celebration in San Sebastián, my husband and I gazed sadly at the ofrenda, the altar, dedicated to the memory of Doña Conchita Sanchez Encarnación who died four months ago. Under the portal on the plaza, at the Presidencia, the Pabellón, and El Fortin Restaurant, white draped altars, rising in tiers, honored her and other lost neighbors. There were loving arrangements of photos and candles, dresses or jackets, mirrors positioned to reflect the still-living, bowls of corn kernels, beans, crosses formed of sand, and golden flowers—not here the showy pom-pom marigold, but a modest, wild variety from roadsides and back gardens. And, to the right of each altar, a metal wash stand holding a simple white enamel bowl and pitcher, chipped and dented. Jews and Moslems wash before praying for the dead; symbolically, so does Catholic San Sebastián.

Doña Conchita had turned her front room into a museum. It was a popular stop for visitors who listened to her recitation of the “I’m My Own Grandpa” convolutions of three families who vowed to intermarry in order to preserve la purissima sangre, their Spanish bloodline. Her collection of studio wedding pictures, old furniture, chests, scrip from the mines, a silk and lace christening dress fit for royalty, and photos of generations of babies wearing it, was San Sebastián captured in its heyday.

A year or so ago, we visited Doña Conchita with an electronic recorder and asked her to tell us more stories about her life and the history of the town. We didn’t have to beg. She told how her family fled during the revolution, locked their valuables in a room, and went off with the key. They were quite indignant that the room, though still locked, was empty when they returned thirty years later. And she told us about a famous tragedy: A wedding party, everyone who was anyone in San Sebastián, went out on an excursion boat in Lake Chapala. As it pulled to shore, they rushed the side and overturned. The bridegroom (from Hacienda La Quinta) was drowned, among many others, when he tried to rescue a child. The bride was pulled from the water by a man who tried for the rest of their lives to get her to marry him. Her answer remained the same: “I am already promised.”

The Rains Come

My husband and I came up to our mountain house at the beginning of June. Nearly all our San Pancho friends had left for their northern homes, and for excellent reason—it was way too hot on the coast. The ones who stayed were all found, upon close questioning, to have air-conditioned bedrooms. We do not, given that our bedroom only has one and a half walls. The day came when life was no fun at all and desultory plans to move up to the mountains shifted to let’s-get-out-of-here mode.

But when we arrived it was hot up here, too. A mile of altitude, intense sun, steep cobbled streets, and as yet no rain—a walk to the store and we dragged in overheated. However, our house was dim and cool and the nights required a quilt. It had been no mistake to make the move.

The garden was glorious. Rose, gardenia, agapanthus, plumbago, hydrangea, geranium, bougainvillea, impatiens, begonia, calla lily, zinnia, hibiscus, nasturtium, trumpet vine, and more, whose names I don’t know, were all blooming. Especially grand were the datura trees, as I call them, with their pendant flutes of exquisite fragrance. One is twenty feet high and greeted us with a good 300 blooms.

This beauty is accomplished by having a gardner, hose in hand, all winter. We are symbiots with our mozo Marcelino—our garden survives; his daughter gets a quinceañiera, the traditional fifteenth birthday celebration for those girls whose parents can afford it.

The rains arrived right on schedule and none too soon as I had begun thinking about those stories from India where people go crazy waiting for the monsoon and start hacking up their neighbors. Not Marcelino, of course. One night, mid June, there was spectacular downpour and it has rained every day since. The output ranges from thunder and lightning storms to the gentlest mist. The eaves and drainage channels may run floods of water or one’s hair may wear no more than a net of droplets after half an hour outside. There may be a sprinkle around five in the afternoon, or it may rain for several days running.

The heated ocean evaporates, the saturated air rolls in over land and, cooling, condenses into rain. Weather 101. San Sebastian sits in an amphitheater of mountains with the ocean as stage, and we don’t miss a drop. The rains come and a few hours later the miracles begin. Resurrection ferns emerge from every cranny of the stone walls. Moss goes from russet brown to electric green. Mountains erupt with purple flowering vines atop fresh-leaved trees. Tiny white and yellow orchids appear on branches. Pink crocus-like tempranillos cover hillsides. Orchid cacti sprout fleshy blooms from the nodes of their thick leaves. And the weather is perfectly cool.

Now the rains are doing the job of watering the garden, but they are not an unmixed blessing. Bougainvillea decide to take a blooming break, geraniums have to be put under cover. Double hibiscus fill with water and hang upside down, as do the grander floribundas. Zinnias are beaten over and have to grow J-shaped stalks to reach their preferred orientation. And some plants just rot and die no matter what you do.

The rains are a mixed blessing for the people, too. In our first year we lost access to the contents of our drawers when the wood swelled. Now we know to keep drawers slightly open but not how to keep mold from dusting leather chairs, cloth-bound books, carpets, canvas of paintings and wooden furniture. When the clouds descend to the level of the village, I must quickly close doors and windows so the white billows don’t roll inside and soak the beds and sofas. A frequent topic of conversation, in the warm candlelight of an evening, is how to deal with the incessant electrical outages. We never know when landslides will trap us up here for hours or even days.

But picture this: Our house, built in imitation of the local rustic colonial style with tile roof and approved slopes, does not leak. We curl up under our covers and couldn’t care less if it pours all night.

On Not Going Back

My fellow blog writers are dropping like flies. Two have gone back to the United States and the ones who are left have departure dates not far off. Their eyes are already focused far to the north. It’s the same for all the foreign community. There is a boiling down to just the year-round residents— those who can face being further boiled in the summer to come. We are among the ones who no longer go back.

Every year another person or couple joins the ranks of the year-round. The ties to Back There have been loosening. For several years membership on all those committees has been allowed to go into months of suspension but eventually they don’t want you any more and you don’t mind. The war will be stopped, the watershed saved, and strategies for world peace developed by others. Friends wonder how important they are to you. Events and crises have gone on fine without your participation. You can hardly bear to face the neglected northern home, the opportunity for spring planting passed. There remains the greatest draw—grandchildren, but there is a perfectly functioning international airport. If your children weren’t nearby, one airport is as good as another.

For us, time in Mexico had come to be the better part of the year and time spent here had gone from two weeks, to three months and on to six. The attachment to new friends had grown. New community interests had come along too but with a tiny fraction of the meetings. We eventually had broadband and NPR. Our new home was lovely and open and filled with soft breezes. The flowers were so easy to grow. More and more ties to Back There were either cut or stretched to reach into the tropics.

Now I admit that my husband and I will also leave San Pancho for the summer and fall. We will go two hours away to our cool mountain home in San Sebastian. Turns out we don’t want to be boiled either. Three other foreign resident San Pancho couples have adopted the same plan and perhaps more will follow. Over time, commitment to the new pueblo has grown with friendships becoming established and joint projects started. When we are on the coast we often think of the mountain town, and vice versa. We seem to have chosen the same bind, but with the not-insignificant difference of a two hour drive rather than four days or more. We can easily check in. No meetings there either, though we did recently join a protest to save an ancient tree. Here we go again.

Bird Watching

From time to time a hush comes over the garden. My neighbors’ music players have simultaneously fallen silent. No trucks or busses are using engine brakes on the highway. The children are not playing soccer in the street. Shrimp trucks with loudspeakers are elsewhere. In this preternatural silence the anis fly into the garden. It is hard not to believe that they have some causal relationship to this lacuna in the noisy bustle of San Pancho—as though their unrelieved blackness is connected not only to absence of light, but sound as well.

The Grooved-Billed Ani is a cuckoo-related bird. In side view, nearly half the head is given over to a great, blunt beak. Yes, birds are dinosaurs, I think when I see that profile. Anis lay their eggs, not like cuckoos, in another species’ nest, but in a communal nest of four or five pairs. Their extended family of eight or ten glides in on wings silent as owl’s, and enters the deepest foliage where their blackness is hardly distinguishable from the shadows. There is only the slightest rustle and tremor in the leaves as they move through. The anis make no more sound than the occasional brushing feather. Insects and lizards are not forewarned.

The anis use my garden as their family table. I like intact leaves and healthy color, so our interests coincide. They eat the stink bugs which can suck the life out of hibiscus. It is so quiet I can hear the tiny crunch as the bugs are crushed and I get a whiff of their unmistakable odor. I hold still so the birds will be undisturbed. Even the breeze is careful. Too soon, in twos and threes, they glide silently away.

The Golf Cart

When a neighbor in New Mexico offered an electric golf cart for sale at the bargain price of $275, my husband and I thought it would be perfect for running around San Pancho. It was the original Westinghouse battery-operated model, pushing 50. Along with solar panels to charge the batteries, we loaded it in the back of our old pickup and headed south. Getting it across the border was tricky—officials demanding non-existent VIN or registration—and that only the start of the trouble. In retrospect, it might have been better to have gone north, put it on an ice floe and pushed it out to sea.


Our golf cart is all steel, thick step plate bent in flat surfaces around the three wheels. Dents are not a problem. We’ve had it painted an electric green by the local body shop and had the shabby seat upholstered in oil cloth with orange sunflowers—you might call it an admission that it is a preposterous vehicle. It creaks loudly over the speed bumps, metal rubbing against metal, the broken right front spring causing it to list wildly and making the passenger hold on for dear life.

It wasn’t long before the old batteries had to be replaced, for $800, and the solar cells up-graded to the tune of $1300. The batteries charge strongly enough in a day to take us all the way out the jungle road and back, but an iffy cable, and then an intermittently faulty throttle switch have caused us to be dumped time and again, cart abandoned at the side of the road while passengers walk home. Only Green Pride keeps us careening around on it, that and getting to park right up front, and seeing the smiles on each face as we bounce by.

A friend recently moved down to Mexico and changed his name to Lorenzo for the ease of his Spanish-speaking neighbors. A vaguely bilingual worker he hired tried to explain to him that the name “Lorenzo” has some unfortunate connotations. “What does it mean?” the new Lorenzo asked. “Well, it’s like…it’s like…well, you know that guy who rides around on that green carrito? He’s Lorenzo.”

The Life of a Garden

Before I came to live in tropical San Pancho, I made my home in the high desert of New Mexico. Our little farm town was in a river valley and our properties, lined up on either side of the river, were irrigated by an acequia system. An acequia (irrigation ditch) takes water from the river high upstream and brings it in decline, gentler than the river, to gates above the fields. When a gate is opened, water tumbles down on crops and gardens.

One never finished lowering this part of the land and raising that, making channels, trying to keep driveways dry, houses, too, getting water to new trees, giving up on hopeless corners. I lived there thirty-six years, and the irrigation work was never done. The winters were cold, and there was snow, but never quite enough melt to fill the river so that everyone in the valley could irrigate at will. The summers were hot and plants could wither in hours. Hail storms, late freezes, locusts…there was a lot of shaking fists at the heavens. It was only in my last years that I could look out on what had been a wasteland of cactus and burrs and see a lawn, large trees, flowers, vineyard, and orchard—a mature garden at last.

Things are different in San Pancho. Start with nurseries where a big day’s shopping might run you twelve dollars. Bananas can hit twenty-five feet in six months. Shade trees require no more than a couple of year’s patience. The birds-of-paradise fill in every empty spot. Philodendron grows leaves bigger than turkey platters. Bougainvillea reaches the roof and beyond. Bright birds come for the papayas. All is lush and the temperature drops fifteen degrees when you come in from the street. Your wrinkles are set back ten years and you could sit all day in contented viewing—a mature garden in time lapse.

Ah, but what comes after mature? Old. These days, philodendrons are choking the philodendrons. The bougainvillea is up on the roof throwing down the tiles. The birds-of-paradise don’t bloom under the shade of the trees. Plants which were intended to settle at different heights are all up there out of sight. Leaf mulch has raised the ground at least six inches. My house is disappearing into the vegetation like Angkor Wat.

To say that the garden needs “pruning” is to understate the problem. Daily, I, my husband, or my sometime gardener, cut, clip, chop and pull. Machete and chain saw. The pile grows in the parking area until the car won’t fit and we call on our neighbor to haul the stuff away in his pickup—for a handsome fee. By the next day the pile will be growing again. Twelve loads since December. Perhaps it is the excess of oxygen that keeps us happy anyway.

Things Change

Let’s say we are sailing up the west coast of Mexico in August of 1988. We are navigating with our Chart Guide, Third Edition. In the bay the chart shows Puerto Vallarta. Next is Nuevo Vallarta (that Johnny-come-lately); on to La Cruz, Punta de Mita, Sayulita, and then, in San Pancho’s location, “HUTS.”

Fast forward to last Saturday night at the polo club. The field is where the mango orchard used to be—when San Pancho had huts. Viewing is from multi-leveled terraces, some with sofas, some with tables, some with, well, beds. Queen-size, white leatherette, green suede bolsters and pillows. One expects grapes to be peeled. Twenty ponies are stabled on the opposite side of the field. Our players have nice white pants, high boots, knee guards and lovely posture. The sweet night comes on, the field is lit, and we sip wine and eat lobster as we watch the matches.

As you come up from Vallarta, just before the town where the big corn field used to be, you can’t miss the vast Cultural Center and its satellite condos. You can’t miss the fears of the townspeople about them either. Will the size and composition of the community shift San Pancho’s center of gravity? Can galleries with classy art, a 5000 square foot common room, restaurant, spa, and boutique hotels add anything of value to our happily balanced mix? There is, however, a movie theater.

Today, the seaside town of Kuta, in Bali, playground of Australians, resembles Vallarta with big hotels and hundreds of shops and restaurants. In 1970 my husband and I visited for the first time and shared a sunset on Kuta beach with a sarong-clad old guy, gone native. Just the three of us and a kid selling coconuts, the tiny thatched-roof village behind us. “You think Bali’s great now, you should have seen it in the Fifties,” he said. But then added, looking vaguely out to sea, “Of course, you had to put up with people saying, “You should have seen it in the Thirties.’ ”

Embroidery and Gunpowder

My husband and I took a trip this past Christmas into the state of Chiapas, down along the Guatemala border. Visiting Chiapas is like looking into Frida Kahlo’s closet. When you see her in self-portraits wearing those colorful costumes, you might think, Ah, those were the days…But those days are, amazingly, not gone. In village after village you can still see the women in the local huipil, a blouse with huge flowers, or banded in red and yellow, or covered in fanciful purple vegetation, all embroidered.

There’s more exotica, too. Handmade marimbas are played in churches where floors, empty of pews, are strewn with pine needles and the air is perfumed with copal incense. Photographs are not allowed of people or images of saints, their essences being at risk. In some churches, those saints are called cuaranderos/healers and the priest is replaced by the shaman.

We stayed in San Cristobal de las Casas for several days and then meandered up toward Palenque. Cresting a hill, we looked down on a village clustered around a particularly grand orange church. We pulled off the highway.

In the town we found the women wearing ponchos of white cotton with wide bands of color, either red, magenta, or purple, the colors looking as though they had just come out of the dye pot. The ponchos were embroidered around the neck and down the front with whatever contrasting color would pop the most. I’d seen them before. I think hippies used to come home with them. Frida wore one, too.

We found the street leading to the church and tried to park. But no. An official told us there was no parking on that street because of El Relámpago—The Lightning Bolt. We’d have to park on a side street. We did as told and strolled toward the church.

We passed people sweeping the middle of the street, ignoring the plastic trash on the sides. Following behind them, a man was pouring out a trail of gunpowder as another laid down, every 18 inches or so, an agave fiber-wrapped bundle like a small tamale which likely was packed with gunpowder, too. The Lightning Bolt. A sweeper said it would go off in about 20 minutes so we went on toward the village center.

A full carnival was set up in front of the church and most of the town was there. Children rode the carousel, going up and down with great glee, but in slow motion since the only power came from other children pushing it around. On the steps of the church, a crowd of dazzling poncho-clad ladies looked at us with some suspicion. Oh, for that picture. Inside three men on a marimba played bouncy religious music as worshipers sat on the floor with a thousand candles between them and the altar. It was the feast day of Santo Tomás.

When we went back out to see the Lightning Bolt, it stretched nearly a kilometer. It would be lit at the far end and head toward the church. We took a position on the street about half way, back against a house, and waited with a few other people.

Whoa! There it came! A fireball, big explosions about once a second, smoke and dust completely filling the street and billowing up over the tops of the houses. We all looked, we all ran. No analysis or assessment. Down the first side street, and then down still further as the explosions began to concuss our chests and eardrums. Everyone pressed fingers hard to ears. Still, those bombs were the loudest sounds I’ve ever heard. Too slowly and painfully, El Relámpago passed and went on to assault the center of town. When we finally could unstop our ears, we heard the echoes of the explosions bouncing crazily around the valley.

The trauma to hearing and brain was with us for the next couple of hours. The delight seems to be permanent.

Voting Via Democrats Abroad

Last February my husband and I drove from San Pancho to the nearby town of Cruz de Huanacaxtle, located the polling place in the back of Philo´s Restaurant, and, with considerable delight, cast our vote in the first Global Democratic Primary. Thanks to the organization Democrats Abroad, we were choosing nine delegates to go to the convention, and we were able to vote at an actual site in the newly created Costa Banderas district. Yes, we could have voted online, but this was much more fun.

No polling place in Mexico would be available for the general election, however. Frequent emails from Democrats Abroad gave us instructions for casting a ballot outside the U.S. but we were dubious that it would actually be counted. We had tried in 2004 to cast an absentee ballot in New Mexico and, to make a long story short, had failed. Still, the Democrats Abroad process seemed our best option.

Though we have closed out our lives in the U.S. and have become residents of Mexico, we haven´t stopped caring intensely about what happens in el otro lado—the other side. In the last years we have wished we could stop caring, but that American mix of hope, disappointment, responsibility, that beautiful dream—it won´t let us go. We wanted to vote.

We followed our Democrats Abroad instructions, sent in our registration particulars for our old home state of New Mexico, and received official write-in ballots to print out. We filled them out in solemn ceremony at the kitchen counter and faxed them in. But two weeks before the election we each began getting emails from the Registrar of Voters in New Mexico asking if we wanted an absentee ballot faxed to us. She emailed again and again. Had we voted or had we not? Finally, Jonathan called her.

“Oh, Mr. Kingson! Yes, we have your write-in ballots right here. Certainly, we’ll count them! No problem.”

Wow! Way better than a touch screen. But it turns out we shouldn’t have worried. We learned today that in our entire county there were only five Republican votes.

Flan Is To Queen Latifa As Jericalla Is To Gwyneth Paltrow

Yes, yes, you can get a great flan in San Pancho, and none better than Eme´s, as Ellen told us in her story last August. But flan, though delicious, mind you, is a little heavy. You can stand a spoon up in it. You can experience a certain “I can´t believe I ate the whole thing” moment when your plate is empty.

Consider the jericalla—a postre light as a butterfly, as delicate as a gardenia petal. An egg custard—milk, sugar, yolks—flavored with canela (cinnamon) and vanilla. The local cinnamon sticks are softer and more perfumed than the ones we use north of the border, though all are imported from the Spice Islands. However, the orchid which produces vanilla beans grows in Veracruz. The Aztecs introduced it to the Spanish and the Spanish to the world. I first heard that jericalla came from Guadalajara, but a dinner guest insisted it was from his home state of Michoacán. My housekeeper says it’s from the state of México. You could suspect it comes from France, since it is made just like a crème caramel or crème brûlée without the caramelized or “burnt” top, but those famous desserts couldn’t have contained vanilla until after the Conquest.

Recipe for Jericalla

Simmer 5 ½ cups of milk with a large stick of canela and a vanilla bean or ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract for 20 minutes. Add ½ cup of sugar and simmer 20 minutes more. Cool. Beat in 5 or 6 yolks, divide among 8 custard cups placed in a baño maria (or, as we say in English—well, we don’t say in English. We use the French bain marie.) Cook at 350° until set, about 30 to 50 minutes depending on the altitude. You could top it with a little grated canela but hold the fruits, slivered almonds, coconut or mint sprigs which often show up on the crème brûlées. It’s too perfect as is.

It Was Just Like That

My husband’s mother was named Romance and her mother was named BonBon. They were easily colorful enough to deserve these names, beautiful and brilliant, alcoholic. It was inherited color—BonBon´s father was one of the Ringling Brothers, the circus entrepreneurs, but by some dark twist the only one not posed in the photos, the only one not rich and successful. BonBon never got over it.

I knew my mother-in-law well. I met her before her decline and I helped to care for her after the drinking and a benign tumor which compressed her brain had taken almost all her senses and faculties.

I knew BonBon, too. True, she was dead by the time I met her grandson, but her daughter Rome, as she was always called, made her live for me. Each Christmas for fifteen years or so Rome had written a story about her family’s adventures with BonBon, the queen of the house, all prerogative and no responsibility, or about tiny Baraboo, Wisconsin, where Ringling sisters-in-law lived in mutual distrust while the brothers took the circus on the road. Rome gave these stories as gifts to her children, her sisters and their children. When I joined the family these gifts were waiting for me.

What a fine writer Rome was. She made her living at it—screenplays, books—but these stories, ten or twelve pages each, were especially brilliant gems. She did have great material. BonBon was a colossal eccentric, as charming and difficult a human being as ever lived. And, of course, the circus. You can’t make this stuff up, as they say, and Rome embellished it with love and humor, originality and punch.

Years later, when we had put Rome in a nursing home, Jonathan and I visited her, explained who we were again and again, brought her ice cream and fed it to her, and searched for topics of conversation suitable for her tiny bit of consciousness. Then I hit upon the idea of reading her stories to her. One a visit and then start over. She was transformed. She came alive, laughing, shaking her head in wonderment, her eyes suddenly alert.

“How did they know?” she´d say every time. “It was just like that.”

What do you think, friends, San Pancho Writers? Shall we tuck away our Mexico stories in a folder labeled: Open in Case of Dementia? For a day when we no longer know we wrote them but perhaps can still marvel:

“Yes! It was just like that.”

I Brake For Folk Art

I am addicted to collecting folk art. I try to fight it. Whenever a new home or room comes within my purview, I do try to preserve some zen-like simplicity. Then I think, "Just one special piece, one spot of color and all the rest taupe or oatmeal or white." But soon it’s, "If one ceramic devil in a car looks good, perhaps six devils in vans, helicopters, and buses would be even better." Mexico doesn’t do zen and neither do I.

Ah, the siren call of the great art towns and villages—Tonala, Tzintzuntzan, Ocumicho, Teotihuacan del Valle, Capula… I get the itch at least once a year to make the rounds of my favorites and look for new villages where, one has heard, trees of life, embroidered blouses, ceramic pineapples or corn husk flowers can be found. My folk art collection is packed on every flat surface, and clusters on the verticals as well. Nor can I resist duplicating the wild colors on walls, columns, cushions and painted furniture.
.
Now I have a new house to decorate. San Pancho, on the coast, is hot in the summer, but very close by, the mountains beckon. My husband and I are finishing a house in mile-high San Sebastian where summers sometimes involve a fire in the fireplace. The house has a colonial look and the riotous color of the coast won’t do. The living room is plastered with adobe—a Ralph Laurenesque grey-brown. It has dark wood bookshelves and shutters and the ceiling has wooden beams. This time would be different, I told myself. Folk art, of course, but subdued. A darkish painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe with a bemused smile and a copper shrine with heavy patina filled with dried brown roses. I ordered sofas in “moleskin.” The sample looked almost identical to the walls. They would be ready in six weeks and I went looking for my accent pieces. Just a touch of red.

I found an old wedding chest from Guerrero painted a dull cherry, and embroidered pillows for the sofas in reds, oranges and greens. I considered a rug with lots of red from Oaxaca, from the weaving village that sent rugs as tribute to the Aztec emperors, but I held off. This time I wasn’t getting carried away, remember?

Six weeks passed and passed again, and the sofas were not ready. Guests came and went, and there were no sofas to sit on. Finally the call came just before we were to leave on a trip. Two quick runs from Puerto Vallarta to San Sebastian were needed to transport the furniture on top of our car. Fortunately the pieces were well wrapped and protected and we left them that way to keep them clean.

When we returned three weeks later, I tore the first hole in the wrapping. The fabric was bright cranberry red. Oh, I knew it. Consider that the sales slip had said: Modela Sala Rojo—Color Moleskin. Yes, we’d worried but had been breezily assured several times that Rojo(Red) was just the model name. I called the store to complain.
.
“Moleskin? Isn’t that a reddish color?” the sales girl said.

I contemplated how much longer I’d have to live without sofas to get the color right. Eventually, I unwrapped them and brought out the pillows. The combination was intense. It was Mexican. Might as well go with that Oaxacan rug. Maybe a devil in a red truck, too.