My Circle of Gold

 

My Circle of Gold

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My friends, I don’t have a story for today. Instead, I’ll send a poem. It is raw, fresh and flawed, but I no longer care about flaws.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love. Remember how we used to say “Make love, not war”? Today my chant would be, “Make love, not hate”.

Love is difficult, takes careful consideration, time, decisions. That’s my experience. I’m so fortunate to have known and to know so much love. I’m human. I get angry, frustrated, irritated at my friends, but love is bigger and I love you anyway. Why not? You continue to love me. So here is my love poem for today.

“Sondra, you need a man in your life,”

Says my young, young friend. I laugh.

“Are you applying for the job, Pool Boy?”

My rejoinder. I am the only woman,

Living alone, in a tiny community,

In a foreign country, a dozen or so

Snowbirds, who come and go,

Willy-nilly. Most of the year I am

The only gringo. I don’t feel alone.

I grew up as if an only child, although

I had a sister. I’ve been married,

Have children, grandchildren to love.

Now I’m an old woman, comfortable

With whom I am, alone.

I’ve had a full life.

Took years of aloneness

To learn not to be lonely

With whom I am alone.

Around me, near and far, a circle

Of quiet people, fluid with comings

And goings. These, you, have become

The ring on my finger,

My circle of gold.

 

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

November 7, 2024

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Wreck on the Communications Railroad

 

            Wreck on the Communications Railroad

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In each life it seems there might be one or two individuals with whom, no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot communicate. We usually marry them.

Seriously, if nothing else, we surround ourselves with people of like mind. We act together in ways beneficial to both parties. We are on the same track, click-clacking to the same destination.

However, now and then we encounter a person with whom out tongue jumps the track, derails, stops at the wrong station, or otherwise completely mucks up what started as a smooth ride.

Presently I’m trying to negotiate a small business deal with such a person. I don’t think it is the fault of either of us. If I say left, she hears right. If she says up, I hear down. Makes it really hard to stay on the rails. It’s even harder to keep imagination under control and not let that creative entity wreck the whole process.

Putting aside the latest attempt to get somewhere involving a stranger and money, I went out to my washing machine to grab the load of sheets only to find water on the patio and dry sheets in the tub.

My washing machine had broken down. Hopefully, it is a small thing, easily fixed.

I put the sheets into my laundry trolley and went inside to email my friend Kathy, with whom I have great communications, a friend of 24 or 25 years. We come close to being able to mind read with one another.

We both prefer email to telephone, maybe because neither of us lives with one of those things glued to our body. So, keep in mind, most of the following was by email.

“Kathy, my machine broke. May I use the washer in Crin’s bodega?” Crin is Kathy’s sister and when she isn’t here, Crin wants me to use her machine periodically, just to keep it friendly.

“Sure. I’ll go unlock the bodega.”

I trotted over with my trolley. The bodega was locked. So I went back home, left the trolley there. I would return in 15 minutes or so.

I went to my computer to answer another friend’s email. There was a new message from Kathy. “I’m flat out on the couch. I’ve got vertigo. Don’t know what is going on.”

“Okay. No problem. Ana and Michelle are coming over. I’ll send my laundry home with them.”

So I trudged back to the bodega to get my sheets and the bodega door was open, light on, so I went ahead and filled the tub and started the washer. Kathy must have unlocked the door for me, gone back to her house and collapsed.

I didn’t worry about it because Kathy would see my empty laundry trolley and know that we’d just slid past on different tracks, side by side.

Following my visit with Ana and Michelle, I walked back to get my laundry. The bodega door was shut and locked.

Back home, I checked my computer and the email from Kathy said, “Okay. I’ll lock the bodega.”

That was strange, not like Kathy at all, but she was not her usual healthy self.

I went over to Kathu’s house. “Hello oo oo.”

“Kathy, when I found the bodega open, I put laundry in the machine. Now it is locked. My sheets are hostage.”

Together we walked back to Crin’s, with keys. “I had Richard lock the bodega.”

“Oh. That explains it clearly. Richard would not see the trolley, would not hear the machine swishing the clothes. He would simply lock the door as you asked, right?”

“You said it.” We laughed. I retrieved my laundry.

See how easily the train jumped tracks with a good friend of years?

No wonder if is more difficult with a stranger, with two people who know nothing of each other.

This is a pretty silly example, trite, inconsequential. It is too easy to add inflammatory elements such as runaway imagination, anger, hurt pride, greed, self-righteousness. Think global. Plunk in a few nuclear weapons, geo-political feuds of centuries standing, power lust, the impossibility of accurately translating many phrases, cultural misunderstandings. The list is endless.

Yes, Virginia, it is possible for two freight trains, running full steam ahead, to crash in a tunnel.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

October 31, 2024

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A Gusty Autumn Day

 

A Gusty Autumn Day

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The northeast wind doth blow! Just like that, fall is no longer on the way but has arrived.

This is not our prevailing wind but is our October wind, here in Etzatlan, Jalisco. Not that much can be said to prevail these uncertain days.

Conditions here are generally mild. This morning the winds are at 6-7 mph, gusting to 25! For us, this is windy!

I love autumn. One thing I love most is that the air carries whiffs of spices. Spicy scents seem to be layered, to waft around my patio, to make love to my nose. Flowers, trees, grasses, all smell spicy in October, each day, each hour, a different mix.

From the 20^th until the end of the month, our town celebrates Festival Days. Depending on one’s whims, this annual celebration is a time of thanksgiving and blessings or one whoop-up party or, likely, a combination. Festival is a time of parades and processions, most of them beginning and ending at the Cathedral and the Plaza.

Streets are closed to auto traffic. A Carnival for the children dominates several blocks. The center of town feels like a street bazaar with vendors hawking jewelry, clothing, artisan craft-ware, toys, pretty much anything and everything.

Food purveyors make various specialties in front of your eyes, hand-patting tortillas, filling tacos, cutting into the centers of coconuts, lifting hot empanadas out of ovens, pouring decadent crepes, stirring vats of birria, selling tamales out of buckets, whetting every appetite.

Horses, the most beautiful horses in the world, parade, perform, and dance to every music. Music. Bands march, play, compete. Some of the music is quite good. All of the music is loud.

Each day begins with a bang. Fireworks celebrate the sun. Around 11 in the evening, vendors, families with sleeping children, dancers, and musicians prepare to go home for the night, but gather in the plaza for the finale, elaborate displays of fireworks, dancing colors.

Last night I hardly slept, not because of the music, audible from town, nor from the fireworks, always audible. Every time I drifted off, a gust of wind knocked another avocado from the tree outside my bedroom window, to crash into the yellow oleander below or onto my rock garden or most loudly, onto the concrete patio surround, each landing a different auditory explosion.

This morning I started out with a bucket to pick up all the fallen fruits for the trash when I realized it would be a suicide mission to walk below that tree on a windy day. The tree tops out at a good 30’. Imagine a hefty football-shaped missile, 5-6” long and 3-4” high, a dense fruit, landing on your head.

Michelle told me that we would call this native variety pear avocados. I call them footballs. My Haas avocado tree succumbed to the heat dome just when it was getting vigorous, ready to produce. Joys of small-scale farming.

Instead of risking my life under the attack tree, I decided to make teriyaki sauce in the safety of my kitchen. Woman does not live on Mexican food alone. Another scent to add to the air while my mixture simmered to reduce to the consistency I wanted. I had to close one window to prevent the flame from being blown out beneath the bubbling sauce.

While gathering ingredients for the teriyaki sauce, I noticed with my eagle-eye bug-check vision, that my garbanzo beans, in a glass jar, seemed speckled. Bean bugs. I took the jar of beans and bugs to the outside garbage, away from the house, to dump them.

I keep all my food in glass jars to prevent bug infestations. Even so, if one bean has a bug, they all have bugs. I check my jars regularly. Bean bugs seem to find it exciting to scoot around the winding lips of the jar lid and into the trails of the neighboring jar, perhaps their version of a Tilt-a-Whirl. From one jar to another. If that happens, one might as well bring the large garbage can inside and empty the cupboard, hazmat suit in place, fumigation gear at hand.

Once before, when I didn’t know the necessary routine for eradication, I dumped a jar of infested beans into my garbage bin under the kitchen sink. Bean bugs terrorized my kitchen for months. Never again, I say.

Mid-afternoon.  Wind has shifted from the southeast, a steady 7 mph with gusts to 27. It’s a great evening for a stir-fry with a side of avocado.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

October 24, 2024

10 24, 2024

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Old Dog, New Tricks

 

Old Dog, New Tricks

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Scritch, scratch, scrape, scratch, scritch. Chips flying. Breathing dust. I really should have eye protectors.

I cannot believe I am doing this job. Just last week, just days ago, I told you I do anything to avoid using sandpaper. Here I am, sanding down metal rocking chairs, one pair so old that the only thing holding them together might be the paint. I proceed cautiously, dust up my nose, in my hair, in the fibers of my clothing. Oh, well. Must be done.

It was not my idea. Kathy and Richard are the first pair of snowbirds to arrive for the winter. Kathy, bless her perfectionist heart, suggested that since I’ve slathered everything else I own with a bright, new layer of life, the rockers deserve a similar renewal.

I could have nodded my head and ignored her. But, no, I could hear the rockers squeaking out, “Me too! Me too!” Green, I’m thinking. Shades of green. With that thought I am doomed.

First, I must make the job tolerable. This I do by covering my hands. Something about the texture of sandpaper, my sensitive finger skin finds intolerable. I have nice leather gloves but I know that before I make one chair decent enough for paint, my good leather will have holey fingers, that is, with holes, not sanctification. Fortunately, in my bathroom supplies, I have a large box of nitrile gloves. The life of a glove, at most, is half an hour. Tolerable.

My rockers are metal, outside chairs, and, as such, have been sitting in the weather, enduring these nine years of intense UV sun rays and pounding rain. They are faded, chipped and peeled in places down to the original, down to rust.

True to myself, I picked the most difficult looking chair to start, one with 5 layers of old paint.  Three hours into the job, with sandpaper, a knife and a wanna-be wire brush, my chair looked downright scabby. I’d swept three cups of chair paint debris from beneath my work table. Time is flexible. I will continue to scratch-scratch until I deem the chair ready for paint.

As the pile of discarded nitrile gloves mounted, I’d quit measuring paint dust/chip debris.

Meanwhile, my attitude to the dreaded job had changed. I won’t say I loved it, but by focusing on the transformation of the poor neglected and abused chair, what I can sing is this: You gotta have heart, miles and miles and miles of heart . . . there’s nothing to it but to do it . . . You gotta have heart.

Thank you, Eddie Fisher. And just like that, the work doesn’t seem to be half as hard. Even smarmy lyrics send me encouragement from the past.

Monday morning I engaged Leo for a quick trip to the hardware store. I left armed with heavy-duty work gloves, safety glasses, and a real wire brush. At the Comex I bought heavy-duty sandpaper and four vibrant paints, flowers in jewel tones, Bougainvillea that hang over my garden wall, plus one leafy green, one paint for each chair. 

Back to work, with better tools, I quickly discovered that something had shifted, perhaps only within myself, but the shift felt monumental. These poor, abused and much neglected rocking chairs had become my teachers. When I go slowly enough,  even inanimate objects speak clearly.

I had been holding up a good front about my coming move. My battered chairs showed me my edges of fear and trepidation, to move, to change, during the end-days of my life. As fear feeds fear, it grew, without me noticing.

My new home will be vibrant with splashes of color, each color a flower, my new garden, singing loudly with joy. Now I know, I can feel, deep in my heart of hearts, this move will be good for me, will give me, even now is giving me, the capacity to change, to begin again, a new chapter in my life book.

As I scratch-scratched away old paint, my sensitive hands protected with new gloves, I sensed the chairs showing me that even I, creaky and rusty as I am, can shine with new life.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

October 17, 2024

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Fighting Fear of Boredom

 

    Fighting Fear of Boredom

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Often I say that I am never bored. It’s true. Always I find plenty to do, things that I enjoy and want to do. Fortunately, I grew up learning to like whatever I am doing. I give credit to the good Sisters at St. Joseph’s. Even today I take pleasure in plunging my hands into warm dishwater or ironing creases into my cotton pants.

I’m not pure or perfect. I dislike touching sandpaper and a lot of things in my home would be better detailed had I not skipped a crucial step in a process of smoothing. I manage to rationalize ways to avoid a good number of my dislikes.

My new house, to which I will move, is finished. Before I move, two things need to happen. The patio roof needs to be built to protect my patio furniture from mountain UV rays, severe year round, not to mention sun and rain. And, my little section of yard must be fenced, to keep Lola, my pooch of various pedigree, from stress.

The owners of my new casita rescue dogs. Lola is quite happy, alone, protecting me and her own little kingdom, behind a wall. Or a wrought iron fence. The fence will keep Lola in and the other dogs out, although only a couple at a time are allowed in the common area. 

Consequently, it will be at least another month before I can finish my move. I’ve packed and moved every single thing that can be pre-moved and am living with my Buddha bowl, metaphorically. It’s not that bad, but every other day I realize I should have kept this or that or the other thing.

I’ve run out of things to do, to pack, to paint, to renovate, pre-move. At the beginning of the month, did you hear the calendar page turn and look out to see the leaves on the Fresno trees turn golden overnight? Did you hear me wailing, “October will go down in my personal history as the only month in which I was ever bored.”?

In my family, we do not do boredom. Thank you, Sister Mary John B. Thank you, Grandma.

Ask my children. They will tell you. Once and once only, each of them said, “Mom, I am bored.’” I swiveled my head and squatted down to their level, and gently said, “Oh, good. Here is a list of things with which I need you to help me.”

My kids might tell this story a little differently. They swear that my brown eyes turned flashing red and green, that my teeth grew into fangs, my fingers into claws and I exuded the stench of a fiery pit, as I gave them orders fit for road workers from a Louisiana prison in the 1800s, complete with snaps of a bull whip. Don’t you believe it. They made up their story. Pure fantasy. Fangs and claws, indeed.

When I was a child, boredom was not yet a popular concept. My words were, “I don’t have anything to do.” My Grandma was matter of fact. “Good. Start with washing and oiling and polishing the base boards.” In our 1920’s farm house, every room had base boards, about six inches high.

Interestingly, although I still did all the jobs Grandma gave me to do, I never again ran out of things to do on my own. Nor did my own children ever more than once suffer from ubiquitous boredom.

Along about the first part of October, I began fearing boredom. To counteract the fear, I gave myself a job. Washing windows. My house has more windows than walls. I live outside while inside. There are eleven large arched sets of windows to wash. Typically, this can take several days.

And it did. I eked out window washing three days. Along with other chores and opportunities which seemed to magically pop up. Here it is the 10^th of October, and my fear of boredom is unfounded. Thus far.

Each evening, like the good Shoemaker in the Fairy Tale, I lay out my job for tomorrow, hoping the elves will come and finish the job for me. The elves have not arrived yet, but I live in hope. And, so far, I’m not bored.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

October 10, 2024

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Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic

 

            Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic

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I am writing this, talking about this hard subject, for you, for that one person out there who needs to hear that you are not alone.

This is a topic nobody wants to talk about. Me, included. Let’s sweep it under the rug and pretend that lump isn’t real.

I’ve lost my son. Again. Last time I lost him, the County Sheriff picked him up in a ditch, beat up with broken bones, a backpack containing heroin and other contraband. Landed in jail. The County had a special program, unique, and he volunteered for it, wanted to get clean. It was a great program, combining individual and group counseling, work, AA and NA meetings, physical help, and more.

Once he left jail, the program continued with counseling, a safe house, a job, meetings, a rigorous routine.

From there this man, my son, managed to put together several years of sobriety. It wasn’t easy for him. He didn’t go back to his prestigious IT job. Bit by bit, we, family and friends, saw him getting better.

Then a couple years ago, we began to see troubling signs. Stories that didn’t quite make sense. But we wanted them to be true, right, so we made allowances. He quit going to meetings. He pushed away friends. A year and a half ago he quit talking with me. I had been questioning some of his decisions, those few I knew about, long distance. When he quit talking, I knew he was using.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, I just heard from a relative, some ugly details of my son’s life. Broke my heart all over again. Oh, yes, I knew he was using. But in the last couple years, I’d managed to compartmentalize the pain. Living 2500 miles away helps.

Two years ago his situation was bad. Now it is beyond ugly and desperate. One knows it is desperate when one hopes and prays that one’s son lands back in jail rather than die in a ditch. That may sound brutal. I don’t know if he will claw his way out of the pit he’s dug for himself. He can, if he asks for help. If.

My understanding is that to those who are vulnerable to it, heroin is like the ultimate bliss. My son, himself, told me that he never forgets, that nothing ever measures up to what he feels on the drug, that it sings a continual siren song.

There is help. For the User. For the Family. If my son had continued to surround himself with friends who didn’t use, had stayed in the job with people in recovery who valued him and supported him, continued with his counselors, gone to meetings, reached out to others who needed his story, had continued contact with his family . . .

This could have been a different story, right?

One of the ways I take care of myself, while crying and allowing myself to feel the pain, to feel it more deeply perhaps, is to throw myself into work.  Physical work is balm, for me.

I will take care of myself. I will not allow his addiction to crush me. I know that I didn’t cause it, I cannot cure it, and I cannot control it. 

So that is why I set about rearranging deck chairs on my own Titanic. I’m between homes at present, closing down my life in my little casa in Etzatlan, moving to another small casa up the road in Oconahua.

My house was a jumbled mess but I had figured to live in the mess a few more weeks. Then when my son was brought back before me in techni-color detail, I began doing what I know to do. Physical work. I decided to make these last few weeks in this house as comfortable as possible.

I rearranged the furniture, the clothing and food items, some of which I had stashed in boxes, the few patio items I had not moved. I worked until my legs, my back, my arms hurt. Compared to the pain in my heart, physical pain was a comfort. One day of hard labor and I felt better. The heart hurt will never entirely go away. I’ve learned how to live with it. (Counseling, sharing, friends, my Higher Power, see above.)

I will not stop loving my son. He’s my 47-year-old baby. I will not allow him to tear apart my life. It’s hard. It hurts. Heroin is a Destroyer. We do not have to let it destroy us and our family. I’m not giving up. Nobody, but nobody, has to go down with the ship.

Whoever needs to hear this: You are not alone. I hear you. I care. I love you.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

October 3, 2024

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Changes? What changes?

 

            Changes? What changes?

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My morning readings include a short poem by Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks. One morning this past week, I read:

Who makes these changes?

I shoot an arrow right.

It lands left.

I ride after a deer

And find myself chased by a hog.

I plot to get what I want

And end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

And fall in.

I should be suspicious

Of what I want.

 

And that pretty much says it. My life in a nutshell.

Rumi has not become my daily horoscope. Some days his words mean nothing to me. Some days he is incomprehensible, like reading mud in my path.

As I’ve become older, some days I actually am able to think, let’s just see what happens, rather than wanting this way or that way and plotting to get it. Wanting, along with wanting to know the outcome ahead of time, is a pit so familiar to me that I’ve hung pictures on the walls and made the pit cosy.

It’s been a Rumi week for me. Another day the poet reminded me that it is good to take time before making decisions. Ha! Another trap I know intimately. He tells me to sniff like a dog. Throw a dog something to eat and he sniffs to see if he wants it. Me, I tend to face-plant into my wants. Rumi says to me, sniff, take three days, then decide. Three days! Is that not forever?

Another day the poet counseled constant slow movement, like a small creek that does not stagnate. Slowly, slowly, one step at a time. Ah.

That day I replied, “I think I will. Slowly. Step. Step. Step. Slowly. No decisions. No wants. Just wait to see what unfolds in front of me.”

 

Maybe Rumi is my Daily Horoscope.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my backdoor

September 26, 2024

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