What you gonna do when the lights go out?

What you gonna do when the lights go out?

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Stand on the curb of any street in any town in Mexico and look up.  No, not that high. Those are just the ubiquitous buzzards, turkey vultures, also fondly, tongue in cheek, called the Mexican Eagle.

Yes, lower down, that’s what I want to show you, the leftover-spaghetti-mess of wires criss-crossing overhead, connecting each habitacion to power, cable, satellite, internet and phone services.

When I lived in an apartment on a busy street In Mazatlan, for entertainment, I watched the men from CFE (electricity) or Telmex or Megacable climb a pole across the street and add another wire, string it across to its destination, and Voila, another connection made without removing any unused wires. Why not reuse a former wire? Not for me to know.

On some streets, the overhead wires resemble strange art installations. I imagine creatures in an UFO trying to decipher a message written in unknown tongue.

Here in our tiny colonia on the rancho, it’s no different. From poles at the entrance, at dirt-street intersections, overhead from house to house, spaghetti. I try to ignore the implications. The wires carry what they are designed to carry, so why worry.

History. I’m told at one time not that long ago, all the houses here (seventeen, not all inhabited at present), were hooked up to one electric meter. The residents figured out a system to pay the monthly bill. Rumor has it that bill-paying time generated a clutch of arguments, disagreements and on occasion, fisticuffs.

Which eventually led to separate meters for each residence. One spaghetti, two spaghetti, and whenever a casita gets a new resident, three spaghetti, four!

No shock or surprise to me when I returned from a two-week holiday in Mazatlan, and the power went out. Let me modify that. MY power went out. Only mine.

An interruption of electrical power is a nuisance. But one copes.

Called Josue to rescue me. He fiddled around and replaced a little black rectangular thingy inside the larger gray box. Said he’d not seen one of those burn out before and let me know there might be a problem that caused this problem, but for now, I had electricity again, and as soon as he had time, he’d run a check on my wires.

Twenty four hours later, my lights went out again. This was not a CFE problem. This was a personal problem.  

My thoughts veered to the strange. A mere three weeks ago I launched myself into space and put out my head lights—crash!—on a marble tile floor. Did I, in a past life, put out someone else’s lights? Is the Great Wizard-person of Life trying to get me to examine my conscience? Have I a problem that needs illumination? (Undoubtedly!)

While I’m being weird, Josue examined the wires, beginning at the source, and found the seat of my problem, a hot seat, so to speak. Out at the main breaker, where a wire, a ground and a wire, go into the big meter, one of the wires had burned to a crisp.

Josue explained. When those men from the past, Joe and Charlie and Ernie and Harry and Tom, once they’d cooled down from inept fisticuffs, after all, they were all in their 70s and 80s and it was not a pretty sight, decided to install individual meters, they went on the cheap. Why use copper wire and brass fittings when aluminum is a mere fraction of the cost?

Meanwhile, Josue and Leo ran a homemade rig from the power source next door to my electrical box and stole power for me so I’d have lights overnight and could keep my refrigerator running. I’ve seen worse solutions put into action.

Josue bought proper wire and parts and within a few hours had restored my service, complete with copper and brass in appropriate places. He fixed me up without adding to the overhead strings of noodles.

You might wonder about, you know, Code? I suggest you don’t ask. I might have to fight you.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 3, 2019

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Sometimes A Silly Notion

Sometimes A Silly Notion

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After two weeks at a beach resort in Mazatlan, I wanna go home!

Not that I don’t love it here. I do. I do. What is not to love? Fantastic balcony view. Comfortable room. Staff who treat me as though I am special. A city I know well. I sleep to the rhythmic seasong of surf pounding the seawall.

But . . . Oh, that trickster little word . . . But. I must make a decision. Nothing momentous. This is a small thing. Nothing to do with the fate of nations.

An unfortunate aspect of my psyche is that when a choice is important, I see my way clearly (in my own mind) and snap, decision made, for better or (often enough) for worse! Marriage? Cross-country move? Buy or sell house?  New job? I know my mind.

Give me something small to niggle on and I can make it last, complete with sleep deprivation, for weeks. In the past hour I have 1. Decided to return to Etzatlan with my friends. 2. To stay in Mazatlan another week, hoping for my residency paperwork to be completed. 3. To return in three weeks with Missouri Jim. 4. To take the bus to Mazatlan the minute I hear my card is ready, overnight and bus back. Whew. Wears me out thinking about it.

Stay now? Return later? I look at each option financially, logistically, physically, and as logically as I am capable.

Truth is, there is no wrong or right decision. Each decision has consequences, some well-hidden, over which we have no control or foreknowledge. No good. No bad.

No judgement. Take this scenario. I came to Mazatlan for beach time with friends. That’s good, right?

Three days along and I fall, land on my f’ord bumper, crack my head and batter my body? Oh, that’s bad, right?

If I’d never fallen, I would never have thought to buy the Cadillac of a marine-blue 4-wheel walker, which enables me to walk while battered but also is correcting my lurching hobble to a more balanced gait. So, hey, good thing I came to Mazatlan, fell and got a new walker, right.

Ha! Neither good nor bad. No judgement. Simply consequences.  Layers of consequences. Some more comfortable than others.

While I mulled choices of chocolate or vanilla, Hurricane Lorena made her presence known, earlier than expected.  Coconut palms bent northward into the wind. A beach umbrella flew past my head. 

This is not a Mary Poppins moment.

Skip the ice cream. I’m off to my room.

When the moment came, the winds and rains from the storm over, I decided to make the drive home with my friends. I made the decision based solely on my heart. I wanted to touch the walls of my own home. I wanted an avocado from my own garden, a papaya from my own tree, a sleep in my own bed.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 26, 2019

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Grass is greener, both sides of the fence!

                        Grass is greener, both sides of the fence!

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One day last week Leo asked, “Had breakfast yet?”

I grabbed my bag and we headed to the gordita place. I’m certain there are a hundred gordita places in Etzatlan. This one is on the man street; that’s what I call it. Block after block of repair shops, tire and tool stores, that kind of thing. Man stuff, man street.

These aren’t stores like we are used to seeing. Might be five or six to a block, open fronts, no signage. Might be more workers than tools.

I sat in a plastic chair, at a battered red metal Coca Cola table, waiting for my gordita. Across the street, a dozen men hung out around the moto (motorcycle) repair shop. Judging by the number of motor bikes in front, my guess is some are for sale.

The tortilleria next door had a fair number of customers in and out, each taking time to chat before leaving with a kilo or two fresh tortillas in hand.

Crosswise is a farm seed store. A spotted white roof dog is asleep on the upper corner. The other lot has a dozen big trucks parked in and around, in various stages of repair and waiting for parts.

Constant traffic streams past; walkers, school children in uniform, a young man picking up trash. A truck delivering bags of cement, the propane truck, a garbage truck, a lawn and garden truck, another stacked with homemade bricks. An ordinary day.

“I miss this,” I told Leo over plates of assorted gorditas. “I miss the constant street activity, watching people, feeling like I’m part of it all. I had that in Mazatlan.”

Leo, who is an old man in a young body, said, “Sondrita, sometimes you lonely. I see you.”

Well, that was last week.

This week I am in Mazatlan, not at my old stomping grounds, but a hoot and a holler south. I’m staying at a resort with friends. Altogether there are nine of us. Plus, I get to see other friends. Hard to be lonely with this group!

We love Mazatlan. Kathy and I hit the ground running, seeing old friends, knocking items from our Mazatlan “to do” lists.

Ironically, last week, I wrote about finding friends in the Obits. This week I nearly got to write my own. That is a terrifying thing.

I left my studio unit to meet Kathy and Richard in the lobby to catch the shuttle to the Marina for dinner. I am wobbly enough without sea water on the elevator floor to add to my woes. My wet shoe sole slid out from under me. I didn’t fall; I soared and hit the marble tile head first.

Kathy said I had the biggest goose egg she’s ever seen. I thought my head split open and there was nothing funny about it.

Within minutes, trained staff, a lifeguard from the beach and the hotel doctor were caring for me. When they could move me, they transported me to Kathy and Richard’s rooms where I was incarcerated for the night, under Richard’s good care. He is a retired GP.

I’m so very lucky. No broken bones, no concussion, no permanent damage, not even to ego. Details are fuzzy and may they ever remain so!

Colorful. That is me in shades of purple and blue. And black. Black from above my brow to mid-cheek. I’ve the best fright mask for Halloween. May it please not remain that long!

Blind-folded, we poke our hand inside a bag of life and pull out our day. From now on, whatever I reach, I’m calling perfect. It might be gorditas and the street scene. It might be my balcony over-looking the beach. Might be my back yard.

As usual, I’ve caught myself pining for grass on both sides of the fence. Do I never learn?

Meanwhile, I shall work on a new definition for “Golden Girl” as purple, my main skin color of the day, segues into gruesome gold. It is an annoyance, not a disaster!

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 19, 2019

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Dear Havre Daily News

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            I have turned into my father and I don’t like it. When I lived in Washington, I used to almost dread Dad’s phone calls because they too frequently meant that somebody we knew, in the family or in the neighborhood, had died.

            Every day I open the Havre Daily Homepage, ostensibly to see what is going on in my old neighborhood. But a not-so-teeny part of me can’t wait to scan down to the obituaries. I am always relieved when there are no names I recognize.

            Just this week, out of seemingly nowhere, an old school friend popped into my head. Where did he come from? I hadn’t given him a thought in many years.

So what do I discover today in the Obits? His mother had died. Not only that, my old friend was gone too. When did he die? How? And how subtle are the connections among us to which we give no thought?

I mourn my old friend. He was fun. I mourn his mother. I considered asking you, HDN, to drop the Obituary section from your paper. But, then, what would I do?

At odd moments over the next few days, my old friend from high school intruded on my thoughts. It seemed like the thoughts were conversations; he’d come to visit and we caught up on old times, talked about in-between then and now. In a strange way, he comforted me.

Your article asking that Havreites be on the lookout for the greater short-horned lizard intrigued me. That lizard in the photo looked very familiar to me. I looked out the window onto my patio. Yep. There the little bugger is, slithering across the concrete. I have a hard time believing these critters could be in short supply in any habitant, not the way they carry on.

Just in case I am mistaken in identifying this particular lizard, being competent in foraging through the wilds of Wikipedia, I looked. Yes, they inhabit the earth all the way down into central Mexico, which is us. There are a great variety of looks and features but the one pictured in the Havre Daily looks exactly like the one over there, see, behind that aloe plant.

             Apart from the obituaries which bring me unwanted news and grief, I appreciate our local newspapers. Larkspurs or lizards, our local news is where we live, where giant tractors harvest bumper crops, wildfires harvest other acres. High School sports, doings at City Hall, a new business opening. Jamie Ford gives a talk at the library. Pam moves her rock crop to make space for horses.

Local news is where we peg memories that never fade. Doesn’t matter if my body is in Mexico, a piece of me lives on the Hi-Line and always will.  

My daughter just phoned, wanted to talk before she read about me in the HDN Obits!

Sondra Ashton            

Looking out my back door     

September 12, 2019  

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Sitting in My Corn Field

            Sitting in My Corn Field

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            Used to be if I had a serious deadline, I would work all day, work all night, work until the project was finished, ready to deliver.

            Ah, well, that was then. “Used to be” is like paint; it covers a multitude of sins.

            Nowadays, in what the “boys” here call “my wonderful retired life”, and it is, mostly, I parse out my day in bits and pieces. Perhaps like today, hang laundry, rest, generally with a book in hand, make the bed, rest, sweep floor, rest, work on project, rest. You get the idea.

            Presently, my favorite mid-morning rest stop is my corn field. Lest you get the wrong idea, I don’t have a “real” corn field. When Jim from Missouri was here in the spring, he gave me a packet of seed.  Not a serious packet such as a serious gardener would buy, but a small budget packet with a few seeds. “Take a chance,” he said.

            Since corn is a major crop in Jalisco, I said, “Not so much to chance.” Where field corn grows year round, sweet corn ought to flourish. I planted it just before the rainy season began. Which season seems to be over and gone a month and more too early. Grumble.

            My field is a converted patch of flower bed, about 2’ X 10’. I have a stand of twelve, each stand with two or three stalks, each stalk with burgeoning ears. I go out every morning to see if there are the dread corn worms. So far, so good.

            Actually, I don’t sit in the corn field. Mid-morning the west side of my casita is shaded. I have two rocking chairs, one for company, sitting on the back patio, surrounded by plants in pots. The corn is in the sun. Sun drenched corn on the stalk is a thing of beauty.

            Since this time of year I have no company, my mid-morn break is a perfect time for reflection, meditation if you will, contemplation or just plain day-dreaming.  

            Meditation, or what I call meditation, doesn’t look like much. Just me, rocking or sitting, looking like normal No candles or bells or incense. No cushions. I can no longer sit cross-legged, Buddha-style. When I get down on the ground, I’m a sight to behold getting myself upright.  

            I do not enter a state of bliss though at one time in my life, I thought that the goal; that if I were really good, I would be able to live in a state of bliss. Life didn’t work that way for me. When moments, hints, of bliss come, I treasure them, knowing they help balance the moments of anguish.

            No, bliss is never my aim. I give attention to the things around me, flowers, weeds, partridge doves, which really know how to play, the hummingbirds harvesting sweet from my patch of geraniums. From there, it is fairly easy to empty my mind of worry, stress or fears for the future.

            So I sit. Sometimes for just a few moments, sometimes a half hour or longer. This brief respite from daily cares is important to me. When I don’t give time to myself, I suffer, perhaps in little unnoticeable ways. But those little ways chip away at my well-being.

            So I sit. I gift myself with doing nothing. My favorite spot shifts with weather, time of day, placement of sun in the sky, mood or inclination. Some days you will find me, generally in a rocking chair, on my front patio. Or at the far corner of my back yard under the jacaranda tree.

            So I sit. Today I sit beside my corn field. Temperature is mid-seventies. Air, softly moving, brushes tree leaves to a flutter. A Black Swallowtail moves from hibiscus to geranium to that long-stalked purple flower. I smell beans simmering in the kitchen. Some days beans and homemade tortillas make the perfect meal. 

            My hip hurts. The lime tree has curly leaf. A young iguana (youngsters are green, adults are gray) traverses the top of the far brick wall, on the way to an appealing yellow hibiscus flower. My class reunion met without me. Life is far from perfect.

            But maybe this is bliss.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 5, 2019

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Missed my Calling

Missed my Calling

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                Today I bring you the banal, the mundane, my trite self-discovery in household hints.

Soap-pads Ohso Special. Also known as SOS or, in Espanol, “fibra metalica”.  Can you believe I could not find any of those soap-embedded, finely-shredded wirey scrub pads that I think of as SOS pads, no matter the brand? Not anywhere in town.

                I am a proponent of shopping locally. Though my town is small, I generally find whatever I need in a store right around the corner. Fruterias and aborrotes abound, that is, fruit and vegetable stands or grocery tiendas.

                As I said, we are a small town. Our tiendas are small but abundant, one on every block. Shelves are crowded. The item I search out might be behind other items, high on a shelf or behind the counter. One learns to inquire.

                Other stores are specialized. Like the spice lady or the herb man. Or my favorite cremeria. Or the egg lady who doesn’t have a store but sells eggs out her front door while chickens run loose in the back yard. Or the strawberry truck or the woman who scrapes and chops Nopale cactus in the Mercado.

                Often I shortcut the search process by asking Leo or Josue or Erica, “Where can I find a whichit?” If they don’t know, it might not exist. Then, and only then, I might put it on my list to bring from the States.

My last trip, I returned with a new deck of playing cards and leafy-lettuce seeds, which I can get here but didn’t know where until this very week. Other times I’ve brought pickling spices, jar lids and rings, and a particular shampoo.

                Oops, almost forgot the other resource—the Big City. When Leo asked me if I needed anything from Costco, I showed him my empty Ajax box for “fibra metalica” scrubbies. Maybe I’m sexist but when I sent a man to buy a special cleaning tool, I was not surprised he returned empty-handed.

                Back to my wished for soap-pads. I bought a box a couple years ago. Ajax brand, printed in Espanol. Contents, five pads which I used stingily and judiciously because I knew they were a rare item. 

                My drinking water comes in twenty liter jugs. In my kitchen area I have a Mexican-style water reservoir with a spigot on a stand. The jug sits upended on the reservoir. If one is in a hurry or careless with the spigot, water might drip onto the floor. Over time, a mineral deposit builds.

                I’ve used razor blades, vinegar, and CLR and they all work, sort of work, with generous application of elbow grease. Quite by accident, I used the last soap bubble of my last pad, swish, swipe, and wiped out the entire calcium deposit of the ceramic tile, Vila! Shine restored. 

                Most of us, well, some of us, Okay, “I” have a dirty little secret; an area I hate to clean and put off scrubbing but my procrastination leaves a grimy residue on my consciousness. Water in our area is laden with minerals. My shower tiles are despicable but nicely hidden. They only bother me. But bother me they do. Hence—my sudden need to find soap pads once I discovered how quickly and easily they work on tile.

                I threw my brain up on the rack and pulled and stretched until it yielded the secret of where in the world I might have purchased my Ajax pads. In Magdalena there is a fairly large, warehouse type bodega. I have not shopped there in the last couple years. The store carries things on the shelf which are hard to find in our town, things like yeast and soap pads.  

                I trotted around the corner to con Lani into a trip to Magdalena. She’s an easy touch and we had a good outing, each finding things we wanted, including my soap pads and more leafy lettuce seeds.

                When you come visit, I shall hand you sunglasses to don when I show you my sparkling shower tiles. I missed my calling. I should be in advertising. 

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

August 29, 2019

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The Quality of Light

The Quality of Light

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            My back yard pulls me out of the house. I take a book with me, as always, but cannot focus when surrounded by such magical glory.

This is the same yard, the same beauty, the same powerful stillness around me day after day after day. What makes it feel different today? I don’t know. Maybe something about the quality of light in August.

            Already the sun slants winter-wise across the sky. Perhaps it illuminates more detail, each edge of leaf, each bird wing, each petal of butterfly. Perhaps my flowering ginger, currently the most spectacularly beauty in my garden, the aroma of which mingles with jasmine and permeates the entire back yard, has put me under a spell.

            I have harvested my last mango. My next crop of papaya are large as footballs. The avocados are ripening. I have gorged myself on the first three luscious green globes. Two months from now, when the final fruit drops from the top of the tree, I will not care. Meanwhile I’ll supplement my diet with mangoes from the market until the season is over and done. I never tire of mango.

            My new neighbor arrived with her five cats. Within a few weeks she and Tom will be permanent residents of our little community. We visited last night just as the cooling rain began to fall. I discovered the “J” in J-Rae stands for Janet. Henceforth, she is Janet to me.

            I have not yet met the cats but will soon, after they get settled in and comfortable with new surroundings. 

When Janet left my place, Princess came bounding over to greet us. This pup followed some walkers and side-tracked into our community. She is the sweetest little thing and I fell in love with her.

Fortunately, Josue and Erica’s daughter Stephany adopted her. Otherwise temptation might have been too great for me to resist. Now I have the best of all worlds. A pup to greet me on one side and cats to love on the other side.

Just for fun I planted a small patch, about two by twelve feet, of sweet corn. It is in full tassel so with good luck and no invasive corn worms, I should have roasting ears soon. Our gardener, Leo, shakes his head at the small height of my corn compared to his corn.

Mexican corn is high as the Oklahoma elephant’s eye.  Along every street, vendors fire up braziers to roast the ears, overripe and colorful. Another temptation. If you value your teeth, you will beg deliverance from such evil. Field corn in all its guises, whether roasted ears, ground for tortillas, or fed to cattle is still field corn. Mexican people have the most beautiful white strong teeth. Bypasses my understanding. Maybe if I were raised eating such tough kernels, maybe.

Leo just came over. “Oh, Sondrita, we just don’t know. Today we stand up; tomorrow maybe no stand up.” His elderly uncle had died in the past hour. The funeral will be tomorrow. It is the Mexican way.

His news, a sobering reminder how important are the people in our lives. I thought about my friend Steve, just completing the first half of his chemo and radiation treatments for cancer in his throat. Of my friend with Parkinson’s. Of Jane’s friend who was severely injured in a wreck. Of Lee’s husband. Of my great-grandbaby’s mysterious recurring illness.

My own physical pain becomes negligible. I am acutely aware how incredible, how seemingly impossible, is this life I live, this life I somehow have fallen into or have been gifted.  

            Perhaps it is the quality of light.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

August 22, 2019

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