Category Archives: Home

Alpiste (13)

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“The pine tree is coming down in two weeks,” my landlord yelled at me. He was angry with me at the time. I’m hoping he didn’t really mean it, doesn’t follow through with his threat. Our pine tree has been through so much. She should never have been planted in this desert to begin with. Fierce wind took more than half of her away before I came. She was haggard, drying, teetering, it seemed, brushing close to death. But she rallied, and now the shade she casts is doubled, maybe tripled. And the spots for birds to perch or shelter have multiplied, as well. I pray she’ll be protected, pray she’ll thrive. I would hate to see her taken, a mean recompense for having grabbed onto life with such grit, such gusto. I’d be afraid, too, losing her would mean losing even more of the birds who like to linger in our little corner of the world.

Already there are fewer birds here than before. The bulk of the house sparrows have disappeared again, and the doves don’t fill the tray feeder in the mornings like they used to, all packed together, a picture I never did capture properly, all those pretty bird butts ringing the wooden frame. When I first began to notice their absence, in my usual fashion, I wondered if it was because of me. Had I been found wanting? Later, I considered other possibilities, but my first thought was I had not been enough in some way. Could it be the desert rats, cute little guys with big dark chocolate eyes, who eat the remaining seeds in the night? Do they eat bird eggs? Attack birds? I don’t know. I worry, too, it is because I switched to the cheaper bird seed. My new attempts at being frugal and the fact I can bring the twenty-pound bag home from True Value on the back of my bike has me using the dull, dusty feed with cracked corn and milo.

In Hopland I bought a hundred pounds or more at a time and blended them myself. It was cheaper that way, but it was a big procedure, up to my armpits in the plastic bags to mix them. But I loved the way the seeds moved through my fingers, rich with oils and colors. In Ajijic, I could walk to the next block over and buy my bird seed from my favorite tiendita there. They would scoop up the alpiste and weigh it in a plastic bolsa. I could get just half a kilo at a time, stroll home with it, so easy. I miss that. I always suspected folks were cooking with it, too, but I never asked. I know it can be used to make atole, a common hot drink, a comfort. But I trust many of my neighbors were feeding it to their birds, as well. On my block and the next, I would hear the exotic birds calling from the entryways of homes as I walked by. I didn’t know alpiste was canary seed until I moved back to the United States and went hunting it down for my bird seed blend.

view of Lake Chapala from my veranda

View of lake from veranda after sunset

I had sparrows in Ajijic, too, though never more than three or four at a time, and one dear hummingbird with a feather out of place. (He was the hardest to say goodbye to, after Ana and Rodolfo. I cried when I took his feeder down and left him with a paper cup of sugar water. He sat on the wire and watched me for a long time.) There were no trees on my block there, no real shelter, but still the sparrows would materialize at the tray feeder, eat the alpiste, chat among themselves. I’d sit on my veranda looking at the lake and listening to their quiet exchange.

Now in my courtyard I think again about buying a more expensive seed blend. Maybe I’ll offer it as a special treat from time to time. Or maybe I’ll begin winning more writing contests, left and right and left again, and I won’t even blink at the idea of returning to the rich, pretty birdseed my birds here became accustomed to. I hear the house sparrows behind me now, soft, muted, rounded sounds, satisfied from a midday snack, enjoying the shade of the pyracanthas and the cooling mist the dry, hot wind wafts their way in small puffs.

The sun reaches my feet, burns my right arm and hip as I write, but I keep going, leaning, crooked, toward my remaining shade. I remember the quiet chatter from my sparrows in Ajijic. I relish them in memory even as I savor the soft murmurs behind me now in the hedge. And even though the heat is still climbing, and even though I have much to do still as the day unfolds, I stop, linger, feeling oh so lucky, loving our little desert courtyard, this small oasis on a hot, busy day.

The Moon and the Stars (11)

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I am sitting cross-legged on my purple yoga mat in the courtyard. I sweep my arms up, my eyes following my hands in their arc. I see a thin sickle of moon framed between the big fan palm and the pine tree, white against the pale blue sky. In the act of drawing breath, of sweeping my arms up, the flicker of thought comes to me to look for the moon. I’d seen it two days in a row from under the pine tree when I filled the finch feeder with thistle seeds. And now, just as I am thinking it may not be visible, that it rises later and later each day, the moon appears. It always surprises me, the unexpected gift of it, a greeting and a message, both. Whenever it finds me, it makes me stop, brings me present, tells me I am not alone. Hello, little one. Here I am. Here we are together.

moon with palm and pine

It feels like divine intervention, makes me feel tended with exquisite care, the moon placed just so, my gaze angled just so, positioned and poised to receive the gift, the true present. When it happens, I feel affirmed. I am in the exact spot I am meant to be, at the exact time. I have stopped on Palo Fierro, that day the raven and the mockingbird danced across the sky, showing me the late morning moon. I have stopped on Benito Juarez in Ajijic, neck craned, blocking the narrow banqueta, my eyes traveling across the vivid fuchsia bougainvillea trailing over the orange wall to find the half moon waiting for me in the afternoon sky.

The first stars in the evening feel a bit like this, too. When I walk at dusk I look for them, alert for that one moment when the sun’s light lessens its hold on the heavens and that first starry glimmer appears. I don’t know many names of the stars and the planets, but I am fond of Venus. When I lived in Todos Santos, it may have been Venus who greeted me in my semi-third floor roost. I’d sit outside under the small corner of roof in a tall chair beside the low parapet. I spent all my free time up there, when I wasn’t working or out walking, feet propped on the metal railing, my world spread out below. I faced southwest. In the mornings I would lean out to the east to watch flamingo clouds, listen to the village roosters taking roll. In the afternoons I’d watch the sun glint off my sliver of sea.

sliver of sea from roost in Todos Santos

moon and Todos Santos sunset from my roost

I can’t count the evenings I sat to watch the sun sink into it, the whole Pacific ablaze. After, I’d watch my hill to the south lose its outline against the blue black sky. But before the colors disappeared, when I spotted that first big shining planet, and after I made my wish, I’d lean way out over the rebar rail, twisting to search for the other stars who made a big cross against the evening sky. I saw it once long after I moved back to the United States, but it was in the wrong part of the sky, at a strange angle, my cross but not. I want to say it is the Southern Cross, but I don’t know where that comes from, like the odd word that pops into your head when you’re working on a crossword puzzle, just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right. I discovered the long narrow cross on my own one night in Todos Santos, and I looked for it every evening after. It felt like the moon feels to me, like a companion, a familiar presence. You are not alone. It whispered to me, sitting in my perch in the late dusk or the dark of early night. And I was ever grateful, I who was so far from home in a foreign land, no firm earth beneath my feet.

Escape (10)

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The air has been terrible for weeks. It brings back dim memories of smog-choked mountains from my first nightmare summer here, images I’ve told myself in the intervening years I must have misremembered or exaggerated in my own dark gloom. I check the air quality in the Los Angeles Times every morning, little colored circles, green, yellow, orange or red. We have been orange almost every day, “unhealthy for sensitive individuals.” Once we were even red, the only one, a danger for everyone, while the rest of southern California was green or yellow. It’s so bad it makes me not want to live here, has me back on craigslist combing for rentals, a part of me screaming inside to get away. Do I live near a nuclear power plant? Head for Blythe or Algondones? Can I trade this sun, this warmth I’ve become so spoiled by? They’ve been in the 60s at the beach all summer. It makes me shudder. (Oh, and yes, I realize summer has not yet actually begun, but we’ve been in the 100s for over a month already. It skews my perspective.)

Can I live like this, with this foul air, if it’s only for a handful of months every third summer? In Ajijic it was the spring months that were bad. I arrived in April, shocked by the horrible air. They allow agricultural burning, so all the fields in Jalisco were turned to ash in preparation for the summer planting, and the smoke would gather above the lake, blotting out the mountains on the southern shore. Like here, people would gaze back at me, a blank look on their faces, when I lamented the smog. How can they not notice? It’s with me always, my body’s instincts on guard against it. My lungs take shallow breaths, as though they might reduce the damage. And our mountains, our glorious mountains that are a presence everywhere, are diminished by the smog. My eyes seek them out again and again throughout the day. But instead of their surprising nearness, their magnificence that makes my heart leap in my chest, they are made distant, dulled, lessened by the ugly air that clings to them.

view from kitchen, ridgetop and houses

view from kitchen, more ridgetop and houses

When I lived in Ajijic I imagined a life where I would escape each spring, moving the cats to Puerto Vallarta for April, May, June. Now I fantasize about escaping to Ajijic for July, August, September. Soon the cicadas will arrive in the village, if they aren’t there already, harbingers of the nighttime summer rains. I lived in the hills where the lightning clung, the thunder crashing close to our tile roofs in the middle of the night, like no noise I’ve ever known, the fierce roar of the gods. I’d lie on my back in the dark, my bedroom windows open to the north and east, the lightning bright behind my eyelids. I’d listen to the thunder’s echoes roll out across the lake below, the sound reverberating for long moments as it traveled across the basin. At some point the downpour began, rain racing off downspouts like Niagara Falls, making rivers of our steep streets. In the mornings the wet cobblestones would shine in the sunlight, all dust banished from our world. I’d look out my kitchen window to the nearby ridge, the crest of our hill. The air would be washed clean, too, in the brilliant summer light, the kind of sharp clarity that makes you want to launch yourself from the rooftop out into the blue sky, to take wing across our world.

Things (8)

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I don’t have many physical objects to stand for the time I lived in Mexico. I think if my departure had been less quick, maybe I’d have made a point to come back with more things, mementos of my time there. But I had a “knowing” I needed to return to the States, and I left four days later. So I never bought one of those bright-colored baskets the man I liked would carry around Ajijic. I’d had my eye on the big clothes hamper. And I came back with only the one small skeleton, not the collection of dia de los muertos figures I’d imagined. I wanted to buy blankets and rugs, the texture and color that calls me to that country. But I came back without them.

So instead it was the incidental things that returned with us, Lolita Roja packed to her gills with our ordinary possessions. I used the rest of the cinnamon I’d bought in Ajijic in the first few months of our return to the States, and when it was empty, I kept the narrow plastic spice jar for a long time, reluctant to recycle it, its bright orange lid and its Mexican label a strange keepsake. My fondness for the little canela container went beyond the norm. It had lived with us there. And I stretched my aspirin for years, doling out each aspirina tablet like treasure. I loved the Mexican aspirin. I meant to buy more the day I spent in Algodones, but I forgot. They come in small rectangular sheets. You poke them out of their little plastic resting places through the foil backing. You only had to take one. (I did the milligram math when I first moved to Baja California Sur.) They were so handy for slipping into a small zipper pocket. And you could just buy one sheet if you wanted to: eight aspirin. It’s one of the things I love about Mexico–you aren’t penalized if you only have enough money to buy a small amount. The culture isn’t like ours. It’s not all about the more you can afford to buy the less you have to pay for it.

cactus start in waterglass on windowsill

I brought back dried marigold blossoms from the Aldama planters. They have thrived here in my desert garden, my “Mexican marigolds” I wrote about in last year’s blog. They are one of the dearest things I have to remember Mexico by. And on my bathroom windowsill I have another, this little cactus I found in Ajijic. It’s still in the small calcified water glass I placed it in when I first got back to the Aldama apartment with it. When I crossed the border, it was hiding in the trunk. I didn’t know what the rules were, and I wasn’t willing to risk losing this small living evidence of the world I’d left behind. I’ve thought I should plant it in my garden, that it would be happy here. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, our time here uncertain, and I’m still not willing to risk parting with it.

I remember how excited I was the first time it sent out a tiny new shoot. And I remember when I found it, lying in the dirt below its parent plant on the side of the road just west of Ajijic. I’d headed past the cemetery, walked until the road ran to dirt, kept going, all unplanned. I came to big fields with running horses, half-finished dwellings made of red brick. The sounds of the cars on the carretera were faint as I walked, and now and then I caught a glimpse of the lake two blocks south of me. In time I came upon the giant parent cactus, ten feet tall, sprawled behind a brick wall. I stopped on the road to study it. There was a tree in bloom beside it, big puffy cotton-like blossoms. I wanted to come back with my camera. I stood in the road for a long time taking it all in. I felt something ease in me. I hadn’t known how much I needed to get away, how much I’d craved open space, earth beneath my feet, solitude. I soaked up rural Mexico, released breath I didn’t know I was holding, gave thanks. And when I was ready to walk on, I found this little piece of cactus lying in the dirt beside the wall, and I carried it home with care.

Grackles Bring Me Home (4)

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My cats and I and Lolita Roja, trusty red Jetta, loyal companion, were heading south on the highway that runs along the western coast of mainland Mexico, sporadic snatches of blue off to our right, the Sea of Cortez. We’d arrived the night before on the ferry from La Paz in Baja California Sur. As the light grew, I remember feeling like I had returned to civilization after nine months in uncharted desert wilderness. I drove through the first highway toll booth and stopped just on the other side to buy ice from the small tienda there. I remember it as though we’d moved from black and white to technicolor, my first sensory experience of the mainland, Dorothy and Toto in that first glimpse of Munchkinland. I remember colors, painted concrete, a kind of careful tendedness, and a sea of bird sounds. Rows of trees–cypresses, I think–lined both sides of the road, filled with big black birds greeting the day. It was madness. They were all talking at once, wild, animated, exotic. I didn’t know then they were grackles, but I was awed by them, and I remember a deep sense of having stepped into another world, not in Kansas anymore. I loved those noisy birds, trees that talked, alive with loud, squawking black fruit.

I left those sheer numbers behind a few days later in San Blas, for the most part, though we had our share of grackles along Lake Chapala, too. I’ve met them three times here since I’ve been back in the States–once when I was trespassing on a golf course in south Palm Springs, once in 29 Palms and once at dusk in the big trees in the parking lot of my neighborhood Ralph’s. But always only a handful, and mostly they’ve been absent. I’ve missed them. They were comforting, somehow, a familiar thread of sound embedded in my life in Jalisco. Last week I walked through Algodones in the state of Baja California. I wanted to find the Colorado River there. I walked alone on dirt roads, wary at first, the U.S.-trained fear of Mexico having seeped into me in recent years without my knowing. I shrugged it off, began to relish my return to this foreign land I’ve come to love. I passed homes part ruins and part unfinished construction, fresh laundry flapping in las brisas, dogs and children watching me from the fronts of houses, bougainvillea and cactus tended along the fence lines. The colors and textures, the richness that is Mexico saturated my starved estadounidense self. Just before the river, I came to a grove of trees alive in grackles. I stopped in the middle of the road and listened to their wild vocalizations, a mad delight rising in my belly, my chest. I felt like I was coming home.