Gonna Build Me an Ark

 

               Gonna Build Me an Ark

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It is not that rain is unwelcome. It is that the rain is so startling. We’ve had rain every day now well into a second week. The forward lookout drips wet. This is the dry season. It Does Not Rain in January. It rains in July and August. Any other Rain time is Bonus. Or a Threat.

I’m doing what any sensible person would do in this situation. I’m thinking about building myself an ark. It’s a lot to think about. After all, I’m not an Arkiologist.

I’m considering a floating habitation bigger than a breadbox, but smaller than a cruise ship. There’s a lot to think about. Even I, when I say the word “ark” see a child’s drawing of a dinky boat with a giraffe’s head poking out a window.

Animals? I have a dog. She will need to be in my ark. I’m not trying to save the world, just my own selfish self from drowning in the floods, should they come. Animals need space, food, clean bedding, staff, and more care than I’m willing to provide. Sorry.

How would one possibly make a decision of which animals to include in one’s private ark? Elephants or chickens? Well, if I were choosing, chickens beat out elephants, just from a kitchen standpoint. However, imagine living in a chicken coop.

Sure, chickens are friendly animals, have babies and drop eggs daily, but, eggs are not all that chickens drop. Ewww. Ammonia. Guess who had to clean the chicken house every Saturday of my growing up years?

That’s the kind of consideration accompanying every thought I could think up of every animal. So, no animals. Exception of Lola.

I’m sure ants and cock roaches and scorpions and lizards will find their way inside.

Food? Ah, good point. Stockpile food or hope for floating restaurants and stores? People are ingenious. Where there is a problem, People generally find solutions. I think I’ll leave that one for you to solve.

Friends and Family? Won’t they want their own arks? Really? Who do you want in yours?

Electricity? Propane? Communications? Oh, details, details, details. Surely we shall iron out the various details as we build. Build, uh, with what?

Hmmm. Come to think of it, I have a perfectly good house. Should the rains continue, and as it is late afternoon and I see the clouds moving in like cruise ships docking in the harbor, why should I not revamp my perfectly good house? Put something like runners underneath, maybe something similar to floats on a float plane, with ballast floats along each side, to keep it upright in storms? If I can imagine it, someone can build it.

This is my fantasy so I can build in whatever amenities I want. So, Cloudy Sky, rain all you want. I shall float along in the comfort of my own houseboat, visit my neighbors when I gently, gently, bump into them, so to speak. Instead of a giraffe poking its head out the window, perhaps I’ll dangle a fishing line.

Actually, this valley with the islands of mountains poking up all around, this country, this very yard in which sits my house, was underwater a mere 900 years ago. Our little town of Etzatlan is built on the mountainside for a reason. The city center at one time sat on lakefront property.

So maybe my fantasy is not so fantastic. So, to borrow a name for my new houseboat from Woody Guthrie, I could, may need to, float the lake singing at the top of my voice, “Roll on Columbia, roll on, roll on.”

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

Last week in January, 2026

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“Stayin’ Alive”

 

               “Stayin’ Alive”

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This will be a shortie. I’m down with a flu. Most everybody has had a flu at least once so you know how I feel.

I am grateful to all the Gods-that-be including the no-gods, covering my bases, that I had a flu vaccination a month or so ago. Otherwise, I might be really sick.

As it is, I want to lie down and die. As long as I’m going to lie down and die, I might as well have a book in my hand. Despite the pain, (Did I mention pain?), this book presented something on every other page that caused me to mindlessly hoot loud laughs, which is not the worst way to go. I still wanted to die.

That was day two. Now we are on day three and I have marginally less pain in my bones. My head is okay as long as I don’t move my neck. Fever and chills are still hanging around, false entertainment that they are.

One of the hardest things about being sick is that I’m not going on dog walks with Lola. She seems to understand. I tell myself that.

Not to mention, my brains have gone walkabout, and I don’t want to talk to anyone, not that anyone would want to hang out with me in this condition. I include phone and email sort of interactions which we think are not contagious, but what do we know, they could hang out there with all the other conspiracy theories. Just leave me alone.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

Jan third week, 2025

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Snipped Off Her Nose

 

               Snipped Off Her Nose

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I have a clay-sculptured duck, painted in the traditional stylistically swirly blues of this region, a thing of beauty, which I had settled firmly between potted succulents in my rock garden.

I have a dog, who looks very like Tramp in the old movie of “Lady and the . . .” The dog is real and when fast on the trail of a lizard, paid no attention to my much-loved duck, bounded over its head, tilting it onto its duck beak in the process. Poor beak. In Lola’s estimation, lizard beats duck in importance. So be it. She’s a dog.

Consequently, duck lost her nose, much like the queen who was innocently sitting in her parlor eating bread and honey when along came a blackbird and snipped off her nose.

If you didn’t grow up with fairy tales and nursery rhymes, you have my full pity. It’s not too late to immerse yourself and you will be richer for the reading, full of wisdom, nonsense and fun.

I almost tossed away my poor damaged duck, still a beauty, if only from the back view.

In the same area as my succulent/rock garden, I have a chiminea, which I use to burn non-toxic paper. When not in use, I cover the top of the chiminea with a tile to keep out rain. One day, without forethought, I set my damaged duck on top of the tile, a prominent place where she leads with her damaged beak.

“I like this,” my first thought. “Duck will be a good reminder to not stick my nose where it shouldn’t be, in other people’s business.” 

We comprise a very small English-speaking community, living in the heartland of Jalisco, in a non-tourist farm community, maybe a dozen of us all told, seldom all here at the same time. We are from different backgrounds, geographic locations, education and experience. We are people who ordinarily might not be close friends but because we choose to live here, part-time or full-time, we have learned to rub together carefully. We need each other.

Recently Kathy came over to tell me, “We are cutting short our stay and returning to Canada next week.”

“I forbid it,” I said, and pretty much got the same reaction I get from my adult children. And, rightly so.

Both Kathy and I laughed. We have a longtime friendship, around twenty-five years. “I understand,” I went on to say. Richard has been in increasingly declining health, running out of steam, needing frequent rests, with his blood pressure cuff showing 0 at those times of exhaustion.

We have amazing health care here, but back home in Canada, Richard, a retired physician, knows the doctors and they all speak the same language. For something like a broken bone, Richard would get local help. For a baffling 0 on the blood-pressure readout, maybe speaking the same language is necessary, no matter how good the interpreter.

All of us friends and neighbors have stuck our noses in with various plans and offers of help, usually without benefit of full information. Nobody could be more so inclined than I, who has known these friends longest and best.

I frequently found myself standing in front of Duck, asking her for advice, for help, for an answer, “Should I? Or should I not?” She always gave me the same answer.

Despite such a good mentor, I know I interfered more than I meant to. Kathy and Richard took it in the love I meant. My friends are back in Victoria today, seeing the doctor tomorrow.

You know how if you live with someone a long time, you begin to look alike in ways? Lola and I share some characteristics. I just returned from a visit with Duck. I took my mirror. I swear our noses are similar.

Sondra Ashton

HWC—is it still called that?

January, 2026, next week

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Memories Like a River

 

Memories Like a River

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One of my writer friends likens our lives to a river which carries us along from beginning to ending. I’m not the whole river so my memories are only a part of what is real. Each of us will remember a little differently, so there end up being many truths flowing along in the currents of our river, many stories, many versions and many revisions, all of them with pieces of truth.

The day before Christmas I received an email headed “Indiana Laconia Elizabeth Harrison County”. The message was from a woman whom I did not know but her name was familiar. I grew my earliest years in Indiana.

When I was days from twelve years, my Dad uprooted us to share his long-time dream to farm in Montana. Those first two years of Dad’s dream were my nightmare. I was so homesick.

When I was fourteen, my Dad sent us back to Indiana by train, to spend the summer with cousins and with my best friends.

Intrigued, I opened the message from Indiana to find a photo of a hand-written manuscript covered in brown grocery bag paper entitled, “The Best Friends Visit Montana”, with a list of characters, Sondra Jean, Phyllis, Janet and Jo Ann. Written by Jo Ann.

The woman who sent the email, Kathy, went on to say she found this manuscript in a box of stuff from Jo Ann’s Mom’s estate sale. Following this initial email, Kathy and I had a series of lively conversations, well peppered with questions from both of us. For me, what also followed was a whole flowing river of memories.

I lived further down the hill from a family with Kathy’s last name who lived in a small but lovely stone house. I had a crush on Richard (an older man by two years) when I was nine and ten. Was he her brother?

Back in those days, in that culture, my crush was of the type that I didn’t dare make eye contact with Richard. When I visited Indiana two years later, I saw the gangly, pimpled Richard standing on a street corner with his friends in front of the grocery in Elizabeth. Ewww. I still remember losing any vestiges of my long-ago crush. Later Kathy told me that Richard went on to be Homecoming King. Sigh.

Kathy was not Richard’s sister. His sister was Cathy. But they were cousins. She asked if I would like the manuscript. Of course, I want it, but I am willing to simply have copies via an email document.

My friend Jo Ann had passed on years ago from cancer. She had lived in Seattle for a while, perhaps I was across the water on the Peninsula at the same time, a thought that fills me with regrets that I might have been able, somehow, before the days of social media, to be with my old friend. Phyllis lives in Tennessee. She had located me a year ago and we keep in touch. I learned that Janet lives in South Carolina. Now I’ll get to talk with Janet.

We girls spent a lot of time with each other that summer of my vacation in Indiana, overnights in their bedrooms or in tents on a lawn. I remember one night, all of us sitting together, each with a different book, reading until a Mom hollered for “lights out”. That memory is smudgy so it might have been with a cousin, but does that detail matter in the greater River?

It was hard to go back home to Montana at the end of that summer.  Notice I say I went back home? I returned knowing I had forever friends. I returned with a different perspective. No longer homesick, no longer crying myself to sleep at night, I had my Montana home, an Indiana home, friends in both places.

I never lost that perspective, even when I lost contact with my friends in both States when we all left school and went divergent ways in our lives. I find it fascinating that in these, my sunset years, my old friends are so close to me in memory, bringing me joy.

I am grateful that Kathy reached out to find me, possibly forging another friendship in the process. Already I feel like she is a cousin of sorts, wading along in the same river. Know what I mean?

Sondra Ashton

HWC or whatever it’s called

First week in January

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