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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New Year—Old Me

 

               New Year—Old Me

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Scraping along on the heels of Christmas, we celebrate the beginning of a New Year. Many of us regard the new year as a time of reflection, of taking stock of our lives, perhaps resolving to make changes.

For me, I’m the same old bag of skin I was last year, still filled with some sad and some glad, much joy and a hint of mad.

As for making changes, I have a note on my desk to turn on the bat light at night for the next week. That will keep the itinerant group of bats from making a new home in the rafters of my patio roof. I like bats, but I would rather they not be overhead. May they find a new home. Soon. Not a personal change but a necessary one. The only change on my agenda today.

My friends Kathy and Richard, whom I’ve known twenty-plus years, longer than anyone in our little community, are returning to Victoria, BC next week for medical tests and care for Richard. There is excellent health care here, but at home they know the doctors and know the language. More comfortable.

I’m sad they are leaving and glad that Richard, who, by the way, is a retired physician, is finally seeking medical help. His wife and friends have been worried. Richard kept saying, “It’s nothing.” The river of DeNial runs deep and strong.

Just yesterday I was telling Kathy that I, even after these years here, I can hardly believe the life I am living, the life I have stumbled upon. I could not have made this up. Remember seminars or weekend retreats when the focus was on goal setting? What a laugh, for me, looking back, thinking I could map my future.  

I’ve come to believe, based on nothing substantial, that my life is built on little decisions. You may label the consequences of decisions, if you wish, good and bad. I’ve made them all. I choose not to label my decisions. Sometimes, in my life, what at first seemed disaster turned out to be rich with blessings. Others, well, I’ve been known, out of necessity, to back up and take a different direction.

I said to my daughter, “After a life of work, work, work, I can’t believe I’m such a sloth. I’m a lazy sloth, and I love my life.”

She said, “Mom, you are always busy. It’s just that now you are free to find joy in simple things. Things like kneading bread or reading your favorite book under the mango tree.”

We are entering a New Year. I hope to keep slothing along, doing my own chores, cleaning my own house. We don’t know though, do we? Every day brings something new, new joys, surprises, grief and pain. We don’t choose what’s in the grab bag. We only choose how we deal with what we grab, seems to me.

Happy New Year and may the coming year, made up of a day at a time, bring you much joy.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

December 31, 2025

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The Christmas Truffle Mystery

 

          The Christmas Truffle Mystery

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In the early morning light, my first thought when I went out onto my patio was that something was not right. “The Barbarians have landed,” I said to my faithful pooch, Lola.

As everyone knows, any common, garden-variety Barbarian comes to pillage. This Barbarian left a bag of Belgian chocolate truffles on my table. No ribbons. No card. No note. No signature.

Not just one or two truffles. A two-pound bag of Belgian Truffles! That’s a lot of chocolate! I read the fine print, looking for a clue (no signature) and looking for legitimacy. The truffles shipped from Belgium.

Not only did the Barbarians invade in the dark of the night without a sound, they had to get past the vicious, snarling, slavering jowls of my watchdog and faithful protector and low-tech security system, Lola.

“Lola, did someone dangle a huge hunk of steak through the gate and you left your post and let them inside? Let me smell your breath.” Lola clamped her jaws shut and waggled her tail with a look of chagrin. “You are no help,” I told her grimly.

While my neighbors and I often share around trays of cookies, slabs of cake or Janet brings plates of her specialty, a loaded pizza, as a group, we are more thrifty than gifty. We don’t do birthday and Christmas presents.

I did what I do best. I wrote to my near neighbors, told them pretty much the above, with the addition that maybe it was that sweet, so friendly, white-haired man who is one of the garbage pickup crew.

Replies flew back. “Not us.” “Nor us.” “Warn’t we.” And such. Each one latched onto my white-haired man comment with much speculation. You can put that one to rest. Stat.

This morning Julie, who lives up the mountain a half-hour away on bad roads, wrote. She’d come by in the evening when I was probably in the shower. Julie is a good friend who used to live on the Rancho and Lola wagged her the go-ahead. These are really creamy, really delicious chocolate truffles, addictive, no doubt.

Julie suggested I go ahead and indulge in a chocolate high. What a good idea. I think I will.

Merry Christmas to each and every one, Merry Christmas.

Sondra Ashton   HWC: Looking out my back door   December 24, 2025

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To Be or Not to Be

 

               To Be or Not to Be

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I’m a “doer”. It’s the way I was raised up. My family never sat me down and discussed choices. If “be” came into any discussion, it was accompanied with a “not”, such as, “do not be idle”. Ever.

There is nothing wrong with that. It served me well. I suspect Life gives us what we need to cope.

Along the years I became aware that my life worked better if I balanced “do” with a smidgeon of “be”. Little bits at a time. Things like a day at the hot springs with the kids. Or an afternoon walk along the river. Little bits.

Then came physical challenges that nudged me to choose retirement and a whole new way of life came into being for me. I’ve never run out of things to do, things to do that I like to do. I gradually developed a “guide”, if you will, or way to approach each day.

Every morning I begin with a list, mental or written, of things to do. By one or two o’clock, I’ve pretty much finished my list. With one exception. I like to leave one of the items listed for tomorrow, sort of a seed. That leaves me my afternoon free to relax, read, putter in plants, just “be”.

It never works, of course. The list gets muddled. Opportunities for being come in the morning. I pay attention. Sometimes afternoon gives over to doing. Almost always, life brings an entirely different agenda than mine.

Take the other day, for example. I had a quite extensive list of things I intended to do. My phone rang at 8:30 in the morning. Leo asked, “Would you like to go to Oconahua for breakfast?” There is a small open-air eatery with excellent food.

“Yes, of course.” After we’d eaten breakfast, I asked Leo if he’d take me to the little hospital for a flu shot, one of the items on my floating list, and then as long as we were back in Etzatlan, I’d do a little grocery shopping. My plan.

After my flu shot I revised my plan. “I feel really good, Leo, but I’d like to go home. I can give you my grocery list.”

Doctors here in Mexico advise us to take the day, to do no work, after any kind of vaccination. It makes sense. Being a compliant patient, (here I sense every doctor I’ve ever had cringe at that outright untruth), I spent the entire rest of the day immersed in a good book. I bumped my list of things-to-do into tomorrow.

The following day, still feeling quite healthy, I also felt that I wanted another do-nothing day. So I granted that gift to myself. Bumped my list into the next tomorrow.

This went on for three entire days. Mind you, I’m not a total sloth. Lots of little things got done. Dishes did not pile in the sink. The bed got made daily. Lola got fed and walked. I took care of myself. Cooked my meals. Visited with friends, some I went to, some came to me.

Along the way, I paid attention. Little things, mostly. A pair of Western Tanagers in the bottle brush tree, surrounded by six fledgling hummingbirds, all feeding on the flowers that look like brushes. Hours out in the mottled shade of the mango tree, just watching, listening, smelling, feeling the breeze, being. I spent some hours thinking about my mother and her side of my family, felt another layer of my personal onion skin peel away. That kind of being.

Those three days gifted me. I didn’t set out looking for anything, no agenda at all. It’s hard for me to put this into words. I feel more complete. Grounded in a better way or different way. The simple moments are the most precious.

Guess what! My list of things to do did not disappear. It’s all still there for me to do. Tomorrow I absolutely must mop the floor and iron that pile of clothing before the pieces begin mating and multiplying. Absolutely must. Unless something or someone comes along to change my mind. Life. Ya gotta love it.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

December 18, 2025

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Winter, No Wonderland!

 

               Winter, No Wonderland!

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My family has returned to the Cold, Frozen North where Winter is firmly entrenched, leaving me alone down here in the cold, but not frozen, southland.

My house is empty but my heart is full.

Today I plugged in my little portable heater for the first time. Woke to pelting rain in the night.  No storm or wind. By morning, the rain settled into a steady light rain, hour after hour after hour.

I realize it is hard for you to dig deeply to find sympathy for my cold woes but please keep in mind my house is made of one layer of brick, no insulation, no heat source. I recall with great fondness my beloved Hearthstone Woodstove from my former home in Winter Wet-Cold Washington.

That said, I also must report that with my new windows, my wee heater is doing a good job of keeping me from huddling in blankets all day.

Meanwhile, please feel free to grab onto all your feelings of superiority and lord it over me, the wuss of winter, griping because my house is cold and damp. I do remember, with no fondness, Montana winters with freezing rains, snow which turns to ice, cars with plug-ins sticking out the front, snow shovels, bitter winds, clunky Sorel boots and puffy parkas that turn the population into Dough Boys.

I grew up huddled in a rocking chair over a floor vent over the furnace in the basement, so, really, sitting in a chair near my little heater, book in hand, waiting until the warm comes, is not so different from old times.

Full disclosure. True, there are not that many similarities. Today is cold. Tomorrow will be warmer. We are assured of much colder days here in this rather temperate country. But the cold days are interspersed with afternoons which bring toasty warmth. And by February, most of the cold has creeped back to its den, wherever that is.

Winter. People are beginning to string Christmas lights and a few decorations. Tiendas display more toys and gifty items. I miss my daughter and my grandson. I’m grateful that we had a great week together.

Today’s rain is just that—Today’s rain. No snow, no ice, no wind. My winter.

Sondra Ashton,  HWC: Looking out my back door, December 11, 2025

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Greetings!

 

Greetings!

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Sondra, otherwise known as my mom, has decided to take a break from writing this week because she is busy entertaining my son and me.  Two months ago, I decided if mom wouldn’t come to me, I had better go to her. 

I am not known for vacationing.  It has been 6-7 years since we have seen each other except over Zoom.  We talk daily, but it truly isn’t the same. 

In case come for a visit, I will give you an idea of what it was like for me.  I got the passport and tickets, then let mom know the dates.  The trip here is rather easy until you get to the connection in Salt Lake.  Many nationalities were seen in the waiting area to go to Mexico.  The messages were only in Spanish.  Luckily Tyler has a language translator on his phone.  We caught about ¼ of the messages.  We got on the plane.  

The view over Guadalajara was so beautiful.  The mountains and trees and green grasses were lovely.  When we landed, we followed the crowd to get our passports scanned at security, declared at customs, showed our passports a few times. They will either check your luggage or shoot you through to the outdoors.  We got sent on our way.

Mom’s friend Leo picked us up at Starbucks.  We went to the car and prepared for a 1.5-4-hour trip, depending on traffic.   Leo is a wonderful tour guide.  He showed us all the new construction to sponsor the next Olympics.   The sights and sounds of the flowers, birds, trees mingled with the buildings and shanties.  We stopped at a little overhang where a family sold ice cream.  Flavors nothing like I’d had before.  I got vanilla and it reminded me of snow ice cream.  Leo got elote (corn) and it truly tasted like corn.  I decided it was best to skip the tequila ice cream.

I had asked mom not to schedule any major site seeing because I just wanted to rest and be.  My first view of mom’s home is exactly as the pictures and descriptions she has given before.  Her brick home is small and full of color and personality.  Her outdoor areas are covered in fruit trees and plants that people back home pay a lot for to have a tiny bit in a pot.  Here they grow wild.  She has a pathos on the garden wall with leaves twelve inches across and 18 inches long!  The patio is covered and has a seating area that is so relaxing.  I can look from the patio through mom’s whole house because the windows are so large and watch the butterflies flitting around from flower to flower in her backyard.   

We have done a little shopping in town, and the sights and sounds have been so fun.  I am not sure I am brave enough to drive here yet.  The roads are frequently made of cobblestones or red dirt with many sharp rocks. In towns, the streets are close together and there is little room for one car to get through.  If there is asphalt, there have been speed bumps very close together. 

We went to a cathedral, Templo de la Purisima Conconcepcion. In English, The Temple of the Immaculate Conception, which is over 500 years old!  Everything was beautiful. 

The stores are not like the stores at home.   They may be 10 feet wide at the most.  On one street there was a brick maker, drinks maker, fruit stand, tortilla maker, and used clothes and shoes for sale.  Little tables are set to eat on the sidewalks. 

At a stand we went to for breakfast, I had the best refried beans I have ever had in my life.  While we ate, we watched as a man across the way whacked the tops off coconuts and prepared the milk and fruit for sale.  Dogs, cats, and birds roam freely.  I haven’t seen any bad animal and/or children behavior.

My son Tyler is more adventurous and has gone sightseeing with friends or walking to the stores for something to eat or drink. 

I lounged under the trees and chatted and read to my heart’s content.

I am writing this with the sound of birds, geckos, and wind chimes in the background.   It is time for siesta here.  I love this time of day.  I may have to bring the institution of siesta back home. 

Deborah Robart for Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

December 4, 2025

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