Dead Ones (12)

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Riba

I have a history of dead ones, a habit of coming upon them. There was a span of time when I lived in L.A. where I would find dead animals while I was driving. I would stop to move them to the side of the road. It must have happened twenty times in as many months. I don’t like that we kill them and drive on, leaving their dead bodies to get hit again and again, turned to mangled meat on the asphalt. I’ve cried over dead deer, over the bird I hit who screamed when he died, over the cat who leaped into the path of my car one night in the rain. When I lived in Sebastopol I found a grey squirrel dead on the edge of the road where it bends. I studied it for a long time, marveling at the way the morning mist clung to its plumed tail, iridescent, feather-like. The next day I looked for the squirrel’s body and found a pellet instead. Finding it felt like a gift, being able to know the little one had provided a meal for a bird of prey. I have three squirrel bones, scoured almost white in the bird’s gullet, tucked away in a matchbox, sacred treasure.

The pellet may have been left by a turkey vulture. We had a lot of them there. But I secretly hoped it was from one of my favorite red-shouldered hawks, though I don’t even know if they eat carrion. There was a mated pair who lived on my hill, who would allow me to stand beneath their perch when I saw them, who would tolerate me speaking to them without flying away. One day I found one of them dead beside the road at the bottom of the hill. It was the female, I think, so big and beautiful, gone now. I brought stones to her, my big quartz crystal, a chunk of amethyst, my offerings for her lying in. I am convinced one of my neighbor’s took her body for the feathers. She took my stones, too. It was hard to forgive myself for telling her the bird had died, letting her know where her body was. Later, I saw the male hawk teaching their offspring to fly, one larger bird and one tiny one, only dark specks against the white sky, across the valley from my home. But their calls were unmistakable. I broke open with grief for their loss, with joy at knowing the male was not alone, touched and humbled by their bravery, going on without her. The memory of the two of them flying together, widower father, orphaned son, still makes me want to cry.

I came upon another of my memorable dead in Todos Santos. I found her on my walk just south of the village. I loved that road through the desert, nothing but the sun and the crunch of the sandy soil beneath my sandals as I walked, and then the sound of the sea in the distance. But just outside of town you had to pass a dumpsite. It looked to me as though the garbage washed in with the floods, branches and plant debris mixed up with the trash. But then people would add to it, and the flies would come. I would hold my breath until I’d passed, trying not to look and yet looking anyway, some weird impulse like passing a car accident and slowing down, craning to see. Sometimes there were dead animals there, but more often rotting vegetables, moldy egg shells, dirty diapers, empty bottles of transmission fluid. The dead one who stayed with me didn’t draw any flies. She’d been dead a long time, I think. The desert sun had done its work, bleached her of her smells. She was in the middle of the dirt road, and I remember how shocked I was when I first made sense of her, understood what I was looking at. She was a small mountain lion. She must have been run over, again and again, and she dried that way, flattened like a pancake in the dry desert heat. The image is burned in my brain. It was like a cartoon rendering, the animal squashed flat by a bulldozer, then peeling itself up off the ground, but it was real fur, real cat feet, cat tail. Her form became familiar to me, and I would look for her each time I walked there. I loved that cat.

Last Monday I rode my bike to the community garden. I had my camera in the basket. I wanted to take pictures of all my sprouting seeds, document their lifespan. I was riding on Palo Fierro, and I passed something lying on the sidewalk. I had to stop, walk back to look, praying it wasn’t a dead animal. It was lying in the exact center of the sidewalk, parallel with the edges, in perfect alignment, as if someone had placed it there with care. (It didn’t occur to me until just now. Did someone stop, like me, move it from the road?) My first glimpse had me thinking cottontail because of the colors, beige and white, but the shape wasn’t right.

When I see who it is, it takes my breath. It’s a barn owl. It must have been hit by a car. I don’t check his underside, only pick him up as gently as I can, carry him to a grassy spot beneath a flowering bush. I pick a few of the bright orange lantana, tuck them by his curved beak, his ruffled wing feathers, his feet. I touch his talons once with my forefinger–they are too amazing to resist. They speak of his wildness, his fierce strength. I can’t help but wonder. Is he the owl I saw flying in the night by the grove of fan palms? Is he my first owl, dead now? We are only a block away from where I saw him.

I get my camera from the bike, take pictures of this dead one. I wonder if a bird will come to eat him. I pray for his soul, even though I know it is being well tended. I cry a little. He is so otherworldly to me, the screech in the night, the hallowed, silent white-winged soaring, his feathered shape so still now, ghostly, extraordinary even in death. I stroke him once and straighten. There is a smudge across the day. We’ve lost a piece of light.

The Moon and the Stars (11)

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Riba

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.

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.

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)

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Riba

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.

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.

Manna from Heaven (9)

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Riba

It is April, my first spring break in ten years. I am indulging in yerba maté this week, and my first cup of tea is exquisite. I walked with my lime umbrella this morning, neon green against the bright clouded sky, the rain a gentle rhythm against the fabric, the storm clouds clinging to the rims of our mountains. It made me wish I had my camera. Now the sun is shining and the barest spattering of rain is coming down. My father told me there are Native Americans who believe when this happens, this joining of rain and sunlight, a new moose is born. Today there are two new moose. My empty teacup beside me on the patio table, I open my notebook to write. A small white rectangle of paper drifts out of it, falls into my lap. Auntie Christel’s old cell phone number is scrawled on one side. I turn it over and see it is the tiny flyer for yoga classes in Ajijic. At first, I just stare at the little slip of paper in my hand, dumbstruck. It may as well have fallen from the sky, I think, than to flutter out of my composition book like that, a piece of the world I left behind.

My mind begins to work again. It must have slipped in the other day when I was using my notebook as a table, writing thank you cards against my knees, paying the dentist bill, when I had my pathetic address book out, stuffed with a crazed fat pile of other little scraps of paper collected over the last handful of years. I remember I picked up the flyer at the health food store in Ajijic, the one next to the nursery at the bottom of my hill, on the frontage road beside the carretera. I bought big bags of yerba maté there from Argentina, the best I’d ever tasted, and the herbal tincture for Sofia’s urinary tract issues. I read the flyer now, surprised I don’t know all the words. When I lived there, I wasn’t really working to build my vocabulary, was just trying to keep up from day to day. I’d understood the gist of the words on the flyer, and that was all I needed. But now I am struck by the language, and I remember the woman wasn’t in practice for the expatriate community there. Indeed, if she had been, I think, the flyer would have been in English. She taught the Mexican community, maybe Mexican tourists, as well. I look up “bienestar,” well-being. “Come and recover your vigor, health and physical well-being.”

I have returned to yoga at last after long years of abandoning it, and now I wonder what it might have been like if I’d returned years earlier. What if I had acted on the longing that awoke in me when I picked this up that day in Ajijic? Would my life have moved differently? I remember the woman taught out of her home in La Floresta. It was in a neighborhood south of the highway, a block, maybe two from the lake on an east-west street. I saw a sign for yoga on a wall there in one of my wanderings. I loved the feeling of those streets, the oldness, the buckled sidewalks, the moss on colored walls, the big trees, the birds, the quiet. The sign for yoga was on a nine-foot painted wall beside a metal gate, a bell. There were huge old trees that canopied the yard behind the wall. I remember standing outside admiring it all. I ached to return to yoga there, to let the peace of that place permeate me. But I didn’t get myself there, and then I moved away.

“Hatha yoga is a discipline that teaches the natural way to live,” her flyer says, and I am struck by that now, by how simple and how true it is. I’m grateful I’ve returned to the practice after more than a decade. And holding this slip of paper in my hands, stroking the Spanish words, evidence of my life in another world, I am struck again by the generous nature of the universe. How many many times are we offered these gifts, these chances to be supported? If I had stayed in Ajijic, would I have made my way one summer morning to Evelia Lara’s home behind that wall, my body eager to return to the practice, the cobblestones wet beneath my feet from last night’s rain? I wonder, and I rub my thumb across the scrap of paper from another life. I marvel, too, at the way it fell from the sky today, manna for All Things Mexico.

Things (8)

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Riba

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.

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.

Exorcising Demons (7)

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Riba

It’s my seventh week, and still I’m afraid each time I won’t have anything “good” to write. I worry I won’t be able to enter in, that “having” to tie my post to Mexico will make it boring or contrived. I worry because I think I have already told you all my good stories about Mexico, my first whale, my magic walking loop in Guanajuato. What else? I have brainstormed lists of things I can write about, and still every week I’m afraid. And I don’t want to spend all year afraid. I want to break through this. Surely I can find things I want to say about a place that goes so deep in me, whose images swim through my days, wade through my sleeping dreams, whose people live inside me–vivid, dark skinned, brown eyes alert and present. I want to find my way in and stay there, watch my blog grow, be happy with what I touch, excited about what’s to come, each new waiting post a pleasure, another chance to write about what I love, what moves me, makes me feel, come alive. I want to banish the damn fear once and for all. (Does it ever work that way?)

Brian laughed at me when I told him. “I’m sorry, ” he said, still laughing his wonderful laugh. “I’m afraid you simply can’t feel that way.” He was teasing but not teasing. I know it defies logic, is ludicrous in light of my scribbled lists of topics. But each week I become tight, braced, hands out in front of me, warding off monsters. Nothing to say? Nothing worth reading? Nothing I can remember well enough? So make it up, I think. You told your readers you might write fiction. So, write fiction, then. Easier said. Maybe I’m really afraid I can’t do Mexico justice. How can I bring Ana to life, laughing in the living room on Aldama? Rodolfo, offering me a taste of his exquisite pipián, eager, watching my reaction? Iris, a wonderful sly smile on her face, bringing me my birthday dinner at Il Giardino? How can I let you know what they meant to me, alone in a strange country, my lifelines there? How can I explain why I almost never call them, how even now my heart breaks a little and my eyes fill? How they weren’t only my anchors, my buoys in a foreign land, but they seemed to love me so completely, took me just as I was, found joy in me?

I wipe tears away with the back of my hand from where they pool above my upper lip. One stray one slides down my left cheek. The misters cool the pre-dusk air, and a hummingbird alights on one pointy tip of the big cactus, taking in their moist cloud. For now, my fears abate, chased off by this release, I think, and because I’ve touched these memories for myself, even if I am no more confident of presenting them to you. I breathe, and sigh, sip my water, listen to the evening chatter of the house sparrows in the hedge behind me, the pwitter of the mourning dove’s wings as he flutters to the ground from his perch atop the wooden fence in search of fallen thistle seeds. Maybe, I think, I only need to become present to do this without fear. And maybe that’s where I’m afraid of failing.

[Editor’s note: This photo shows my writing notebook and binoculars on the patio at Las Flores in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur.]

Fruta Picada (5)

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Riba

The first time I saw a street vendor selling fresh-cut fruit in Mexico I was wandering through a residential neighborhood in Cabo San Lucas, where a man wielded a small portable set-up, rolling it along the banquetas there, the sidewalks. His work area held whole fruit, cucumbers and pineapple prepped for making slices, his tools, his cutting board, his kitchen towel. It was framed of wood and bordered on three sides by glass. I watched from a small distance, fascinated, while people stopped to make their requests, listening to the rapid-fire Spanish, the different selections. In Ajijic we had a fruit stand every day at the edge of the plaza, and one just east of town on the carretera, the highway. Wednesdays another family always set up shop at the top end of the open-air market, the tianguis. You could find mango and melons, papaya and cucumbers and jicama, sometimes huge bosenberries or bright red strawberries or pineapple, fresh coconut. When there was time, they’d make up clear plastic cupfuls in advance, all cantaloupe or watermelon, or a mixture of berries, the bright colors and succulent fruit a still life on the street. Or you could ask for your own particular combination from the fruit on hand, and they’d prepare it for you. Some vendors use a dry blended chili powder; others offer a chili sauce. Always there is fresh lime and salt. The first time I tasted limon y sal y chile on fruit, it surprised me, all that hot, tangy, salty sweetness. But it grabbed me, too. I loved it. And when I was counting calories, I’d go for the cucumbers.

I remember stopping once at the fruit stand on the highway east of town. I was walking home from shopping at the Super Lake grocery store in San Antonio Tlayacapan. I sat on the curb near La Floresta with my large plastic cup of cucumber spears with lime and salt and chili sauce. I savored each long luscious slice, dipping again and again into the spicy red sauce pooling at the bottom of the clear plastic. And our first day on the mainland, the cats and Lolita Roja and I found fruit as if by magic en route to San Blas. The downhill road to the coastal town wound its way through the trees, and at one slow turn three women materialized in front of my car, apparitions with cups of cut fruit in their hands. I got flustered–by the unexpected suddenness, the blind curve, the rapid Spanish, my own ambivalence and groggy brain after a day of driving. I pulled over on the side of the road and chose one container of mixed melons and one of green mango. When I told them I wanted to save the fruit for later, they put the chili powder and the salt in little plastic bags for me, gave me whole limes. We stayed two nights in San Blas, time for the cats to recover from their ferry crossing nightmare. I made three meals of the fruit. It was the perfect thing. I would sit on the veranda outside our room in the warm April breeze eating green mango con limon y sal y chile. I watched the lighthouse revolve, watched our little patch of water move up the estuary, slow and quiet. I listened to the grackles calling from the trees, from the rooftops. I licked lime juice from my fingers and studied the houses down the street and wondered what it might be like to live there.

[The photo of the fruit is copyrighted by antefixus21 and can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21728045@N08/2328071644/.]

No Holds Barred

To tenderness and trusting

Category Archives: Memory

Dead Ones (12)

The Moon and the Stars (11)

Escape (10)

Manna from Heaven (9)

Things (8)

Exorcising Demons (7)

Fruta Picada (5)

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