Christmas, Cookies and Critters

 

Christmas, Cookies and Critters

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Last year I realized I had come to dread Christmas obligations. I like to give to others. But when it becomes an obligation, trying to find that just right small gift for the families on the Rancho, seemed overwhelming.

Years ago, my own children and I agreed to not give adult gifts, but to focus on their children.

Last year I told my neighbors here at the Rancho, that instead of joining the usual gift exchange, I would give a gift to a family in the community who had touched my heart. I told my friends I would wrap the gift with ribbons of thoughts for each one of them. So, don’t bring me a gift!

This year I did the same. I gave to a woman who needed clothing for her children. Then I expanded my scope to include the Old People’s Home. For those good folks and their (truly) loving staff, I baked 32 trays of cookies.

One day I mixed dough. The next day I baked—all day long. The next day I was too wiped out beat wasted tired to go with Leo to deliver bags and bags of cookies. “You go, tell me about it.”

Obviously I hadn’t thought through the process very well, just jumped in, just like I usually do. No regrets. Just a bit of chagrin.

Gifts are given, Christmas is upon us, each with our own memories of Christmas Past, hopes for Christmas Future and plans for Christmas Present.

Baking day heated my sieve of a brick-and-window casita to a cookie-steamed heaven. I like it hot. So did the Grand Poobah Daddy Scorpion who I found that night marching through my kitchen area toward my bedroom door.

“I don’t think so,” I said, grabbing the can of Raid. That knocked him wobbly. I will gladly escort spiders outdoors but have no Zen with scorpions. I happened to be wearing my Timberland boots, so I stomped him dead. It is not the scorpion I stomped who worries me. It is the scorpions I don’t see. I think about them in the dead of night.

It is winter. Creatures want their comfort just like I do. I get it.

A nice thing about Christmas week is the first day of Winter. To me that means, now the days get longer. Longer in terms of daylight. Even here in Jalisco where there are only a couple hours difference between summer and winter light, I notice the difference.

Another critter, a welcome one, which comes into the house on a sporadic basis, is a fresh fig. My tree is a mere few months in the ground but she is giving me regular treats, like this one today. I’d never eaten a fresh fig until this year. My former association with figs was only in Newtons. It is a poor comparison, let me tell you.

When Lola and I walk, we pass a section of rock wall along the arroyo. On the other side of the wall, two horses and a mule line up to watch us. I think we are their entertainment. I used to pet Pretty Boy and give him a treat when I could but he pushed and pressed until he knocked through a section of wall.

Now we just look, nod, stop and talk. The mule is large and lovely but well-used. He has a scald mark on his back that makes me flinch. The little mare seems sweet and I want to treat these friends, but how?

Leo asked what food I wanted him to buy for the week. “None, Leo. I’m out of pesos for the month. I have eggs and beans and rice and potatoes and onions and everything in my garden. I am rich. No shopping this week.”

Nancie and Lani planned a special Christmas dinner for our community. I toted up the number of people and sent my regrets. I’m not ready for larger gatherings, even outdoors.

Clouds mar my Christmas. My daughter is home, isolated, with the latest variation of the Covid virus. My son is not well. I would love to be with them. I’m not ready to travel.

Unfortunately, Covid and other illnesses are on the high upswing here just as everywhere. Mexico has re-instituted mask requirements.

Outside my wall in the little seating area we built last year, I sit with one or two friends at a time. I share my garden bounty. My friends, my children, know I love them. I tell them.

To each and every one of you, with love from my heart, have a wonderful Christmas.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Christmas week

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Beached in My Back Yard

 

Beached in My Back Yard

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Christmas is a-coming soon and although there are only five couples and me in residence at the Rancho at present, plans are afoot and afloat for communal gatherings.

Me, I’m trying to respectfully decline invitations while ignoring judgmental comments without cringing. I cringe. We all would prefer our friends to understand us, right, to support us unconditionally, right?

Back-story first. When the Covid pandemic hit, most of us here masked, bought disinfectants and hand sanitizers by the gallon, isolated and generally took great care when we had to be out and about.

Gradually, as we’ve all seen, restrictions became really tiresome, we lined up for vaccinations, or not, and cautions fell by the wayside. Like litter.

Me? I found the time to be a gift, a gift that nudged me to simplify my life even further and to explore inward spaces rather than outward adventures.

More back-story. In pre-adolescent days, I yearned to be a Carmelite nun. Quit snickering! I’m serious. I was filled with Catholic passion and, no doubt, romanticized convent life. The Carmelites were neither teaching nor nursing sisters. Carmelites led a cloistered life, a life filled with prayer and devotions, hidden from the outside world.

What happened, what erased my childish dreams? The usual: adolescence, raging hormones and boys. I never gave the Carmelites another thought, oh, perhaps brief moments of laughing at myself immersed in marriage, babies and baking pies and such.

I believe the Universe loves a laugh and why not!

Instead of a convent from which I would have been booted, no doubt, post haste, these many years later I get to be isolated in a different form of Paradise. For me. For me, it is Paradise. My gift of a semi-cloistered life.

Fortunately, I saw the gift immediately, accepted it, unwrapped it, saved the ribbon, and began living it. I like it. I am happy. I am content.

Some of my friends cannot accept that I am happy. At times I wonder if they ‘need’ me to be haring off hither, thither and yon, to town, to the beaches on the coasts, to restaurants, just go anywhere, why can’t you, why don’t you, why won’t you?

In their voices, in their questions, I hear judgment. I hear, Poor thing, she is afraid to leave, afraid to get sick. She’s giving up on life.”

I’m not afraid to leave. I’m not afraid of being sick. And I am more alive than I have been in many years.

My truth is that I’ve found deeper life. For me. Those two tiny, important words—for me. That sounds sanctimonious and I hate that it sounds that way.

That which I am experiencing now is simply the present chapter in my book of life and I’m fortunate to have lived through many varying chapters. This chapter won’t last forever. None have. So far. I do not know tomorrow.

I very well recall past years when I could go nowhere without a book, just in case there was a spare minute. I had to be doing, doing, doing, something, anything, terrified to be alone with my own insides.

In my backyard, I’ve a special place (I just mis-typed palace for place) where I like to sit, sun or shade. Some days I take a book. Some days the book stays closed. I don’t have a rule.

I visit neighbors. I go to town, rarely, but I go if I have need or want. Right now, I prefer to keep precautions for better health in place.

Please, go to the coasts, to the Big City. Go and enjoy every adventure. Have parties. Show me photos, tell me stories. I enjoy that you go and have good times.

Please, know that I am not bereft. I am not in a prison of my own making. I am off on my own special adventure where every day is a different treat.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

December, the middle and stormy

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Outside the box by an inch

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I own a revered and older washing machine. A washing machine is possibly the most wonderful tool ever created by man for the use of women. I never did like lugging laundry down to the river to pound it on rocks and dry it slung over prickly berry bushes. I highly recommend men learn to use a washing machine also.

My washing machine is ancient. It was old when I bought it. I live in Mexico. When something breaks down, somebody will be able to fix it. That’s what we do here. That is the reason I revere my old machine. It is fixable. It is so old that it has become fixable approximately once a year. For a few pesos the machine will work another year.

I do not want a new wonderful computerized machine. They are also fixable. However, thanks to the brilliance of new-world marketing schemes, I mean plans, the fix costs more than replacing the old-new machine with another new-new machine, if you follow me.

I already experienced a breakdown and a fix this year. What frustrates me is that the controls seem to be jumbled out of order. I want to wash my laundry in cold water. The cold/cold setting gave me no satisfaction. Actually, it gave me no water at all. Warm/warm seemed best but, my goodness, the water steams on cool mornings. Such as this very morning.

Leo makes the rounds on the rancho every morning. I’m the only person living on my ownsome so generally he comes here first. To make sure I am still alive and do I need anything from town.

My venerable washing machine had just completed steam cleaning a load, so I told him my frustrations. “Leo, please call your appliance man to come repair this machine. I know it was just repaired a couple months ago. The controls are out of whack. I’ve tried to just live with it but it doesn’t work for me.”

Unlike me, Leo gives thought to each problem presented to him. I tend to rush stomping into fix-it mode.

Leo sat comfortably while contemplating my problem.

“You want to wash only in cold water. Is that right?”

“Yes, I don’t want to use hot water on laundry. I’ve tried every setting and can’t get it to work the way I want.”

“Why don’t we shut the hot water off where it enters the machine?”

Pause for a moment of silence.

We burst into tears-rolling-down-cheeks laughter.

Leo turned off the hot water to my machine.

I felt like a right idiot.

I washed my next load of laundry in cold water, no steam rolling off my jeans. Now to go hang my clothes on the berry bushes, I mean, on the clothesline.

The sun as a dryer breaks down now and then but it self-fixes within a day or two and costs nothing to run.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Edging into Christmas Spirit

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A Recipe for Failure

 

A Recipe for Failure

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The other day I said, “I was worried that Jane (nearly 95 and frail) might not hold up during your special dinner at the restaurant.”

Immediately I was scolded, “No, no, no. Don’t say that. That is a negative thought. We don’t need negative thoughts. That is bad.”

Whoa on me. I was taken aback. And I felt uncomfortable. I hadn’t meant that I was immersed in worry, sending sure death pulsing into the Universe. I’d had a fleeting thought, perhaps improperly expressed, that my friends’ dinner go well, without being shortchanged by Jane’s needs.

Wondering from whence came my discomfort, because I don’t mind being scolded, I let the matter simmer. It flung me far back into my past when I was grabbing onto any idea which promised me the moon, life without pain and angst, riches, success, beauty and life forever, O Queen.  

That era of my life was a miserable, terrifying time, for which I am grateful to no end. Without the horrors, miseries and terrors, I would never have been given the gifts to help me turn my life around. I am grateful.

I learned that no matter how hard I tried to stuff the painful and negative aspects of that time into a box and bury them, they refused to stay underground but insisted on staring me in the face until such time I got the courage to deal with them. Courage and grace and tools and self-discipline.

I learned that when I “thought” something to be the most horrible thing that could happen in my life, often it was the greatest gift. I simply had to wait for the gift to unveil itself. Was this easy? Was this fun? Heck, no. I got nowhere by saying to myself, this is negative so I refuse to think about it.

I also learned that making real changes in my life took much more than positive thoughts. It took action. I had to make a decision and put it into action.

Each one of these prickly gifts, and lucky me, I was gifted a lot, helped me to turn my life from pain and misery and depression to a pretty dang good life, one with a lot of friends and laughter. I could tell you some stories, believe me.

I like to liken life to a battery. A battery has both positive and negative poles and both are necessary for the battery to work.

I learned to be grateful when an event, situation, or imagination, hit me upside the head.  Learned to be grateful and wait until I could see what the box really held. ‘Twarn’t easy.  I am no judge of what is positive and what is negative.

For my friend, maybe her ‘positivity’ works, but for me, I can’t buy into “if I only think positive thoughts, I will only have positive results.” Like I said, I tried.

Contrary to what I just said, I also believe that thoughts are important. They matter. Thoughts contain energy. They add to the collective unconscious.

I am very human. I have negative thoughts. Mean and evil thoughts. Ugly thoughts. Critical thoughts. Worries. Along with kind and loving and generous thoughts. Human. The thing is, I’ve also learned which ones to hang onto. I choose which ones to feed and nurture. It’s not easy. That self-discipline-action thing again.

I have help. Or Help, if you prefer. I tap into that Help frequently. My Help comes in various forms, including when from the trenches, I desperately cry out, “Oh, God, I need help.”

Most of the time Help comes in human form. You. My friends. My enemies. Or a cloud. Or a tree. Or a giant philodendron leaf larger than a turkey platter, the most beautiful leaf I’ve ever seen that stopped me in my tracks. Or a rock. Or a scent. A sound. A touch from my dog. Or when I stub my toe on the metal screen door.

My battery is working. Both poles. When I tried to have only good, pure, sweet positive thoughts, I only got into more trouble. Maybe it works for you. Celebrate what works.

For me, it felt good to sluff off that need to be perfect, thinking only good thoughts, at which I was an abject failure.

My friend perceived my words as negative. To me, I was expressing that I cared. I cared about my elderly friend, and I cared that my friends have a good dinner together.

We are not all born on the same page. We don’t all need the same lessons. Maybe even I can learn to say “I care” instead of “I worry”.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Begin season of wretched excess

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