Gripes and Groans

 

               Gripes and Groans

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The tree tops are doing the bendy splits against the sky. I am not having a good day. The Pacific storms continue to line up like a pre-school crocodile, one by one, holding hands, coming to get us. Coming to torture me.

Okay. Okay. I get it. Storms are not personal attacks. I’m not that important. If I’m going to gripe, might as well gripe big.

Pollen, we have pollen, we have lots and lots of pollen, to paraphrase an old song. Might as well sing. When the wind blows big, like now, pollen adheres to every pore, as you know, with the Montana winds. To me, pollen means runny nose and eyes dripping down my face. As you probably know.

My cousin Nancie has been here at her rancho home in Etzatlan a mere two weeks, a lot of that time, down sick. We’ve not even had a good visit. I urged her to go see the doctor. I was worried. She went, whether at my urging, no matter. Nancie has the flu.

Remember when we were children and we’d get sick, and to get well, it always meant a stick down your throat to make you gag and a shot in the rear? They still do that here, the shot, no age qualifiers. If you get sick, you are likely to suffer the indignity. I have. It works. Nancie is on the mend. Pat is down with same.

I’m not all gripes. Three more friends arrive this week. I’ve got a slab of sea bass marinating on the counter, fresh strawberries and whipping cream. I’ve a good book at hand, a comfortable home.

Despite the winds, I have a yard full of flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies. I have 3 new cotton ball cocoons hanging on one of my papaya plants.

My cousin feels better. I have friends who like me and a dog, whom I choose to believe adores me. Can’t ask for much more than that.

The wind will quit howling and settle down to its normal gentle breath. Won’t it? The raging Pacific storms will attend anger management classes and return to, well, pacific. Won’t they? The sun will soon brighten the sky. Won’t it?

The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I hope to see what tomorrow brings me, good and bad and in-between.

Sondra Ashton      Looking out my back door

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This is October

 

              This is October

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I took advantage of a break in the drizzle and had a chat with my Azalea. “This is October,” I said. “October. You do not bloom until December. That is the rule. Understand?”

She thumbed her nose at me and showed me yet another emerging burst of white flower. Sheesh. Children. What can you do?

I pulled my baked potato out of the oven, steamed a handful of green beans and had breakfast. I’m at the point in my life where I eat what I want and when I want. No rules. Like everything else around here.

Drizzle, indeed. October is a dry month. Plant corn and harvest cane. Drizzle. Splash. Drizzle.

Yesterday was so grim and gloomy that I stacked up the fabrics I had laid out to make a shirt and a cap and dumped a puzzle onto my cutting table. I can do what I want and when I want. No rules, right. Well, up to a point. I do have my standards.

 I have all winter to sew my projects. Today I want to play.

If play means I bake a mango pie, that’s how I play. In July I froze a dozen bags of mangos from my tree. Pie is play.

Since I’m breaking rules, my dog Lola should benefit too. Yesterday I drained a cup of whey from my fresh batch of yogurt. I use whey when I bake bread. Today I drenched Lola’s dog food with the whey. Oh, yum. That did not take long to go from yum to gone. Licked her bowl clean.

I think I’ve spotted the papaya butterfly. There is a butterfly that attaches a cocoon like a cotton ball to the underside of a papaya leaf. Two cocoons are on the ground and a pair of middle-sized butterflies I’ve not noticed before are flitting around the area, playing and feasting on flowers, especially the aloe flowers. There are more cotton ball cocoons so I’ll keep on the lookout. I’ll name them Papaya Cotton Butterflies.

There is a stunning snail in my menagerie. The shell is elongated, close to three inches long, an upscale motorhome, the snail even longer when stretched on the go. Another newbie in the wet neighborhood.

The toads are out in force. These toads exude a substance, I am told, that drives dogs bonkers. My Lola is not a toad licking dog, at least I’ve not seen her stoned, but she loves to roll in their road-flattened carcasses. That is her delight.

Today is another day to play. I’ll bake that pie, read a book, work on the puzzle depicting book sales in a park along the canal. My neighbor will likely show up for an hour of puzzle time. It’s a good day to play. No rules. Ask my Azalea. Sheesh.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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Clouds in my Coffee

 

Clouds in my Coffee

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Here I am, coming to you with another weather report from my little corner in Jalisco. In mid-September we begin holding our breath for the coming unwanted end of the rainy season. Was that the last rain? Will we get another?

No rain in sight the last week of September.  No rain marred the skies the first week of October, despite promises from hurricanes and tropical storms on the coast.   

Oh, my, the clouds.  Clouds topped the raft of mountains to the back of our little town, dropping their bounty on the other side, leaving us dry but hopeful.

On the horizon around us, cloud banks rise up like looming monsters in a movie, heads high, arms waving and weaving and threatening, “Ooooooooooooooooh, I’m going to get you!” And . . . disappearing.

Then we have an interval of blue sky sunshine. Then, like mushrooms, the next batch of monster clouds loom up from the horizon. All day long, alternating.

Cloud watching became our most popular entertainment, knocking watching grass grow into second place. You can, you know, watch grass grow. Ask any of us.

Crin, Janet and I went out to Laguna Palo Verde last week for lunch. The hillsides were the lushest I’ve ever seen. Feeding our eyes and hearts took precedence over feeding our stomachs. Unbelievably, green can get greener.

No matter where I am, autumn is my favorite season. I don’t welcome all the changes but manage to revel selectively. We get a new crop of birds and butterflies (along with snowbirds) to mingle with those here all the year.

The bed-sheet butterflies, wafting from flower to flower with grace, much like white sheets waving in a breeze on the clothesline, always make me smile. The yellowhead blackbirds return, once again in fewer numbers, but I’m happy to see them.

I’ll be equally happy to see all my snowbird friends return from the north country, some for a few weeks, some for a few months.

It is a simple pleasure, but, I enjoy visiting my favorite produce stand to see what goodness is new this season. Pepe had boxes of nectarines and peaches that tempted me. I picked up one of each. They were rock hard with no fruity scent, obviously shipped from afar, so I passed them by in favor of locally grown mandarinas, my favorite Dominican bananas and tunas, the fruit of the nopales.

Back on the street, from the back of a pickup truck, I bought two giant squashes, cream color with green vertical stripes. This large squash is an excellent vegetable and makes the best “pumpkin” pies.

With coffee this morning, I savored a slice of guava cheesecake I made with guavas from my neighbor’s tree. I picked a ripening papaya from my own tree along with one of my last avocados.

Once again the clouds are making monster faces on the horizon. Last night, despite zero percent chance of rain, coastal rains swooped over the mountains and dropped 2 1/8 inches of rain. Possibly our final moisture.

Our next season is “Dust”.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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Ties That Bind

 

Ties That Bind

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Among the ties that bind, one of the strongest threads, I believe, is the place we call home.

When my family moved from the rolling hills of Ohio River country in Indiana to Harlem, Montana, I felt like my roots had been wrenched out of the earth and planted loosely in a foreign country.  My first day in school was my eleventh birthday and I had nothing to celebrate.

We gather experiences along the way, don’t we, and in later years, when I needed or wanted to come home, Harlem was my home. I had come to deeply love the people and the country. Home was where Dad lived. Home was the place that formed experiences that made me who I am today.

I’m fortunate to have experienced many places as Home. I feel as At Home here in Mexico as any place I’ve lived. It’s simply a different chapter in my Life Book. Yet, the deepest Home in my heart is still Harlem.

Events these last several days have left me feeling quite unsettled. The fire that destroyed the two historic buildings on Main Street rattled me. When I learned the fires were  deliberate, that news made it more heartbreaking, to me.

In a way, the fire felt personal. The buildings were empty, abandoned, sad monuments to our past. You want to know what still lived in those blackened ruins? Our memories.

The movies we saw. Our favorite seats. The people we sat alongside, watching those films, laughing or crying or clutching their hands in terror as the gorilla climbed the Empire State Building. Oh, wait, that one was laughter.

Being female, some of my memories of Don’s Pharmacy are more terrifying than any movie. Back in the old days, we had to go to Frank, our faces red with misplaced shame, to ask for personal products wrapped in brown paper, tucked behind the back counter. Over the years I learned that Frank always acted with kindness and never with judgment.

Buildings aren’t what make a town. People make the community. History. Buildings and people come and go, changeable. More history. Following the fire, it is even more heartbreaking to have a hostage situation in town, to know that people died and people were injured.

The person who set the fire, the man who held a woman hostage, the woman who tragically died, those people who were injured, all are human beings, each with a story we may never know, but, each person, every human being, leave an impression, that becomes a part of our town, that affects us, whether we are in town or far away. Each story is important and should not be dismissed; that is my belief.

Eight of us ‘girls’ who graduated from Harlem High in ’63, have formed an email group and are in touch every few days. Some of us were discussing the recent tragic events when one of us dismissed my concern with the words that, “It is no longer our home. It is no longer our world.”

Those words made me feel even more sad, though I know parts of my friend’s story and why she feels that way. I disagree.

The home ties to our town, the school, the friends, those neighbors we knew or knew their names, the streets we walked to the Confectionary for a hamburger and milk shake at noon, the library, which burned soon after we graduated, as did our newspaper office later, the grocery stores and hardware stores, the churches, the gumbo roads, the Milk River, the old grain elevator, the trains rumbling through town, the bank where I had my first account, all create threads of memory, ties that bind us home. Most of all, the people. All are pieces of our world that made us who we are today.

I’m lucky. In later years, I came home and created new memories. I explored the countryside, most especially Hill, Blaine and Phillips County backroads, found sheer beauty that I never knew existed, met newcomers and got to know old timers, all in my town that was a shell of its former self, with an already gutted Main Street, a town with less that half the population of that when I was in high school. Harlem is still my hometown.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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Here Be Dragons

 

          Here Be Dragons

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Here be dragons on my mind map.

I think. Therefore I am. Am I? Until I’m not. Will the me that I am I go on thinking? This is 4:00 in the morning when my mind leads me, willingly following, down strange pathways. Not often. I treasure my sleep, laying up storerooms of good dreams, a few uneasy dreams, and, way, way back in the dusty corner, a couple of old nightmares whinny.

Now and then my mind wakes me up, grabs my metaphorical hands and dances me onward.

What started last night’s dance was a length of fabric. Our neighbor Janet had been cleaning out cupboards. She had given a piece of cotton goods to Crin who brought it over to me a few months ago with the suggestion that maybe it would suit us both for outdoor cushion covers. I put the fabric, colorful, obviously a piece of decorator fabric made for a specific purpose, evident by its narrow width, on a shelf for later.

Every single piece of clothing in my wardrobe, long pants and tunic tops, I stitched with my imagination and a sewing machine. Most of my clothing began as used discards, teardowns and remakes, sheets, odds and ends and finds.

Fabric stores in town sell synthetics suitable for weddings, dancing, quincineras and such. I wear natural fibers, so find cottons and linens when and where I can. With time, a most useful commodity, and thought, my finds gradually reveal to me what they want to become and I make it happen.

This is not a hardship. I live frugally. I live creatively. I own a dressmakers form. I like figuring out how to make wearable clothing from things not meant to be worn. My clothes look nice, are unusual, colorful, and are comfortable.

Now and then I would pull this length of cotton, fuscia with gray ribbon stripes, off the shelf and sit with it a while in silence. It remained mute.

Yesterday, Crin, here for a three-week surprise visit, came over to ask if our fabric would be good for covering two couple kitchen bar stools. Perfect, I told her, and there will be plenty for leftovers to make a matching table cloth. Or place mats, she countered.

At 4:00 in the morning, awake with my thoughts, a quite simple tunic began to design itself. They do that sometimes. First, I saw the front and back take shape. Then a scalloped neckline showed up, giving the severe lines a softness. Once I got to going down that pathway, there was no return. How about a slender cap sleeve, with the stripe going horizontally rather than vertically. Oh, yes. In my mind, I saw the shirt cut, pinned on the dress form and stitched together.

I dragged myself out of bed at the usual time, early riser that I am, went to my sewing room out in the bodega, measured enough fabric for the tunic with a few added inches for any changes that might need to happen, folded the fabric and set it aside for putting together later. The design that has unfolded is so simple and so obvious that I am amazed at myself, that I never saw it earlier.

I folded Crin’s portion, plenty for barstools, a large tablecloth and several placemats, to give to her when she comes over this afternoon.

That is how I spent part of my time. What did I use for currency? I paid attention. My wallet of time is thin. It seems to me that I spend more time than I save time, yet, there always seems to be enough time.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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Lo, the Dancing Mountains

                Lo, the Dancing Mountains

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I live at the foot of mountains. Each direction from my house, I see mountains. Some mountains march in a row. Some island mountains stand alone. Mountains are so changeable. I like that about mountains.

From my evening reading chair, I look onto an island mountain, not a great distance, juxtaposed against a far roofline. Sometimes the mountain edges off into the trees. Sometimes the mountain hugs closer to that house. Sometimes the mountain stands tall, sometimes snuggles the earth.

The mountains do not stand still. They dance about. Some days the mountains arise, tall like giants and some days the mountains hover, soft and low. The mountains change color too, but, we all know that. Sometimes the mountains disappear altogether, but they always return. Mountains are reliable like that.

I know there are rational scientific explanations for these things, maybe to do with atmosphere and the angle of light and such. To me science does not take one iota from the magic of dancing mountains. Science adds dazzling ingredients to the magic.

Today above the island mountains, those to north and east of me, huge narrow, upright columns of pure white cloud loom, climb high into the sky. The columns appear much like volcanic eruptions, although these mountains have been dormant for a few years. I like watching these columns lift and grow and change and climb the sky.

I don’t own a television, but I’ve never had a problem entertaining myself.

At my age, one gets to be introspective with no apologies. I’ve been pondering Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, making them mine, that I am here in these times to be a witness.

For years, I’ve always said that in my next life I want to be a tree. I’ve changed my mind. I want to be a rock. I like trees. I like the pulsing life of a tree. However, a rock also has pulsing life, just softer and lower.

Building on the idea of being a witness, if I get to return as a rock, I’ll be around longer, will see more. Maybe my rockiness will emerge from volcanic activity, maybe otherwise, maybe I’ll live on one of the dancing mountains, here or there, maybe along a singing river.

I want it all. I want the burning sun to bake me. I want the freezing ice to crumble and crack my surface, to create crevices for the unknown to happen. I want the wind and rain to whittle away and burnish my surface. I want to see what life comes next. I want a dropped seed to find home in one of my crevices, to bloom and grow, maybe a tree.

Sondra Ashton         Looking out my back door

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Parsing the Weather

 

Parsing the Weather

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If you know me at all, by now, you know I’m obsessed by weather.  Blame my Dad. He instilled the trait in me that day we stood side-by-side on the ditch bank, scanning the sky for the least wisp of cloud, in that dry, dusty summer when I was so young. Once instilled, the weather virus flourished.

I, of all people, know that the only real way to tell weather is to step outside, look, listen, smell, poke your hand under the elements, and feel. Predictions are seldom reliable.

Take yesterday. I sat at the computer and the little tease at the bottom left screen said, “cooling trend the next five days”. I opened the weather tab to check the details. It showed warmer temps for the following five days. Probably another AI glitch. AI is good at glitches. Probably meant to say, “cooking trend the next five days”.

Rain is falling, listlessly. Has been for the last couple hours. Barely sprinkling. The sky is getting lighter so I predict the sprinkle will end soon.  There is no wind. Temp this morning is 68. Humidity is extreme. UV is extreme. AQI is good. Air pressure is up and down like a yo-yo, which for me, translates to an Arthritic Pain Index of extreme.

In an hour, all the above will have shifted except for that final measure, which I call the API. In other words, normal.

Me, I’m having a good day. The house is reasonably clean and tidy. I’ve freshly baked bread on the counter, a tray of cookies in the oven, a slab of salmon thawing for dinner.

I’m also having a sad day while a little rain falls down my face. Two good, close friends recently have been diagnosed with cancer. At our ages, this is common, right? That doesn’t make it any easier because I’m selfish and want to keep my close friends close as long as I can.

 I’ve become more consciously diligent lately to tell my friends that I love them, to let them know I care.

It’s your turn. Most of you know me better than I know you. I read the obituaries. Some people I know well, some names I know. I’m aware the names unknown to me were neighbors, that perhaps we passed by one another way back when at the library in Chinook or on the street in Havre or at the car show in Turner or driving on the highways. Each Passing Beyond gives me pause for respect and honor and caring.

I believe there are variations in degrees of loving, similar to the air quality index, perhaps. I may not know you well enough to know your moods and desires, that you love lilacs and can’t stand the smell of brussels sprouts, that your heart has been broken and that you are a Cubs fan.

On my Love Quality Index, I can always say I love you and I don’t want to lose you and when you hurt, I hurt too. So, here it is. I love you. I care. I give you honor and respect as the human being you are.

In this short time, rain has stopped, the temperature is rising, clouds are parting for the sun. I love you.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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