Category Archives: Life

Musings from May 22nd (4)

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I sit and eat panna cotta from the big plastic trough with my tiny red-handled spoon, the Italian gelato rich and creamy, outrageously sweet, swirls of caramel drizzled over it. No surprise, I am greedy. I want more caramel. I imagine the cold chewy rivers of it bending between my teeth, melting in my mouth, if my own more generous hand had held the ladle. (Whose voice is this?) I spoon sweet mounds into my mouth, cold tongue. It is all a part of a piece these days and weeks, this relentless keeping at bay all the things that await doing in my world right now. Cold gelato pushes down the almost unendurable anxiety at the base of my spine. I run my frozen tongue over the spoon and purse my lips, not smiling.

The Next Rock (3)

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For long weeks, I was still living in my old place and spending time in my new place. I could feel the way things were shifting. I remember thinking one day how my old place was still “home,” but I knew I was beginning to move toward the new one. One day I brought over a saucepan to make tea, a can of Bon Ami, bright washcloth rags for cleaning. I wondered if the awkwardness I felt was a funny feeling of being disloyal, forming new attachments, wanting to still cherish our home for as long as I could. I was poised between two worlds, the lizard perched on the side of a rock, ready to launch himself. Soft landing, we always hope, the next rock as lovely as the rock we’re leaving, warm or cool at all the right times. And almost always, if we are lucky, the new view becomes familiar and beloved, the neighbors dear, a wrenching to leave it, cactus and palm, canine and human, hibiscus and pine. “Almost always,” I whisper to myself in the hot summer afternoon, both talisman and promise. If we are lucky.

Midsummer Night’s Dream (2)

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Last night in between sleeping and waking I thought about my father. I wished he was still here, imagined being able to call him up on the phone just to chat. My dreamy thoughts drifted to ideas I’ve had for a short story about him, the first flicker of my writer self coming back to life. It woke me up. Lying in bed, I watched the moonlight on the mountains, our shortest night of the year. I really need to polish up “The C-Word,” too, I thought, and begin revising my material from my nine-year-old narrator. I tingled, dead limbs returning to sensation. Maybe Madhu’s sweet comment the other day (on my first lone blog post for this year of being 55) planted the seeds for the regermination of my writer. I am behind a dozen posts. I’ve wondered if you, my readers, will still be there. I fell off the edge of the earth, I think, have been dangling by my claws, tail twitching. But I’ve crawled to safety now, so glad to feel cool, moist dirt beneath my paws. I lie licking my fur.

Psychic Ties and Parallel Worlds (1)

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The previous owners of our new old trailer home went back to Canada ten days ago. Since then I’ve felt my psychic responsibility for both dwellings. I agonize over my decisions for the trailer, line up fence contractors, research air conditioners online with Consumer Reports. I cry watering the bougainvillea here, ache when I hear the house sparrows chittering. I sit in our courtyard garden and savor sight and sound. I have dreams of future lushness in our new home, but for the beginning our life outdoors there will be stark in comparison, no trees, no hedge alive with birds. I’ll miss our big fan palm and our valiant pine tree. I’ll miss color and texture, bark and stone and hibiscus. I so hope the new tenant will take care of the lives we leave behind us here.

I lay in bed this morning while fierce winds had their way with our world and worried the teetering fence with the rotted post at the trailer may end up across the road, prayed if it fell it would fall inward instead. When I saw the fence between my landlord’s yard and ours had given way, my first thoughts were go now, move now, don’t wait. My next thought was how odd that this fence would fall over when I was worried about the one at the trailer. Was this some weird kind of mirroring, some parallel universe thing?

Birdbath props up the fence

When I walked over to check on the trailer, the fence there was listing but not down. I stacked more bricks against one side, wedged the bird bath against the other. Now it’s late at night, the wind still noisy behind our closed doors, but I don’t feel anxious. And there is another sweetness that came to me today. This afternoon, when I went to lock the trailer door, I turned back, compelled by a wash of feeling. “I’m looking forward to coming to live here,” I said to the empty rooms. I think it was the first time I felt it in my bones. I had a lopsided grin on my face when I turned to leave. There is life outside here, too. I passed the orange nasturtiums beside the propped up fence on my way out. I was still grinning when I headed home.

Ode to Mexico (54)

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This is the last of my 54 posts while I’m 54. Keeping to “All Things Mexico” this year has been a stretch for me. I agonized over what was left to tell, sorry so many of my stories about Mexico had already come out of me the year before when I was 53. Or I shook my head at how the words I cobbled together here so often fell short of capturing the heart of the memory. But still you, my readers, came to visit, told me you liked what I was writing, cheered me on in spite of my own dissatisfaction and my often too harsh critic. I can’t thank you enough for that kindness, that generosity of spirit. And though I have not always liked what I came up with here, there were times I laughed at myself as I was the first to “like” one of my own posts. Do people do that?!!? I wondered even as I clicked on the “Like” button. But there are at least a handful here I was pleased with enough to choose, silly though it may have been. It made me happy.

And as I contemplate my next year of posts, the 55 I plan to write while I’m 55, I think I will again leave the “theme” wide open. I seem to be a funny creature in that I crave a theme, a focus, and then I rebel against the constrictions of one even when it’s self-imposed. Perhaps I will continue as I’ve begun, alternating “wide open” years with years that are more structured. I think of writing a year of posts about all the days or moments I’d like to relive. Or a year of sleeping dreams with thoughts about how they might weave into my daily life. I imagine writing each of the year’s posts about a different being or character, blending fiction and fact. And as I write these possibilities even more leap into my mind, and the part of me that longs for structure becomes eager to try my hand at one of them. But I think for now I will allow this next year of posts to unfold as they will, wander where they might, grow like weeds, like thistles, airy tufts tossed by the breeze to land where they may. And in the time between becoming 55 and turning 56, I’ll let some part of me dream about what kind of shape I might want to commit to for my 56 posts while I’m 56.

So, as I end this year of posts, I breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of the unconstrained year that now awaits. But I know, too, that in my ornery way, I may flounder in that unstructured space, adrift with no idea what to write about. It makes me grin, this odd determination to be confounded either way. And, too, I am not at all sorry I tried to write about Mexico this past year, no matter what my efforts brought. I imagine I’ll continue to write about Mexico, to even try again to tell my stories as the years unfold. I hope to go back to Mexico, again and again, to travel or to live, to dig in and unearth the soil of that country with my wriggling toes, that new stories might spring from that rich and fertile land for me to tell. And I hope even these imperfect posts might serve as my own ode to memory. I think of my first whale, sitting on the edge of that Todos Santos beach while she hovered nearby in the depths just off the shore. I recall my magic wandering of the steep stairways, the callejones of Guanajuato, or my first breathtaking view of that hillside city, the painted buildings a wonder, the most beautiful ciudad I have ever seen. I remember Ana standing across the living room from me at the Aldama house, laughing, or the night she and Rodolfo walked me home along the cobblestone streets while I sang in French, and the night I followed that same path alone, crying like my heart was breaking. I hope my year of posts might serve to honor my memories, my own ode to Mexico.

I Have a Dream (53)

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I spent Wednesday at a local resort, “day use” there my treat for spring break. I drank coffee and did my qi gong and my yoga on the cement beside the hot tub. It was warm from the sun, and I lay on my back and watched the fan palm leaves bend and bristle in the wind. I stood beside the wall of cloudy glass bricks, alone in my corner of that public world, and I kicked my legs forward and backward, punched the air before me, stood still at the end of the series, the dragon stands between the heavens and the earth. In between I floated in the hot water and let the tension leak out of my body and felt a dream emerge in me. The “Travel” section of the Sunday Times was about Mexico, and I read it greedily. It was focused on Mérida, a city in the Yucatán. Just like that, the desire to visit was alive in me. And somewhere in the midst of doing my qi gong in that hidden section of the resort, of floating in the hot water watching the San Jacinto mountains peeking out between the palm trees, of feeling the sun-warmed cement beneath my back, against my thighs while I twisted my spine and stretched my hips, a vision grew in me of a neighborhood in Mérida and a part I might play there one day. I dreamed a fountain and good food, a plaza garden, a co-op, a milpa, peace.

The Woman and the Dog (52)

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I remember walking from La Casa Azul to downtown Todos Santos. It was late afternoon. I don’t remember where I was going, maybe to meet my Spanish teacher Guillermo at the cafe. I was taking the side streets north of the highway. I passed a woman washing clothes in her yard, another taking stark white dress shirts down off a clothesline. A man in a hat was hosing down the dirt road in front of his house when I passed. He smiled and nodded. “Buenas tardes,” I said. I passed a house with a garden in the front, vines climbing the wire fence, purple blooms. A woman was scraping food from a pot into a white enamel bowl on the ground, her brown dog dancing at her feet. “Oh,” I said. I was grinning. “She’s so excited about it.” Ella está muy emocionada sobre su comida. I remember the woman’s laugh, how it opened up her face. I remember the sweetness inside that moment together, of being part of her love for her dog.