Sitting in My Corn Field

            Sitting in My Corn Field

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

            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

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Missed my Calling

Missed my Calling

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                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

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Quality of Light

The Quality of Light

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

            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

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________