Might be this, might be that.

 

Might be this, might be that.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The longer I live, the less certain I am about anything. In fact, when I detect certainty in my thinking, I immediately stop and investigate to find the flaw.

You’ve all met Leo. He works in my yard a couple half-days a week. Leo is much more than a garden worker. I’ve come to depend on Leo for all manner of help. He is a gentle man, educated, generous, and has a brilliant sense of humor. Over time, he’s come to seem a grandson to me. He trusts me enough to tell me when he thinks I am wrong and that’s a huge compliment.

I’m the only one of us who lives here on the rancho without a partner and the only one since the pandemic who lives here constantly year round. That may have served to cement our friendship. Leo shows up most mornings to ask if I need anything. He’s my taxi driver, shopper, legal advisor, all-around helper. He has a big heart. Sometimes I call him Mother Leo.

We were sitting on my patio, me telling a story from when I lived in Mazatlan. Suddenly Leo leaned forward and said, “Sondra, you have . . . “ and here he used an expression, a masculine anatomical term, which I thought was pure Montana but perhaps is pure Mexican and crossed the border north centuries past. After all, Mexico has written history centuries longer than Montana’s.

The expression means courage so I’ll use that word. “Sondra, you have big courage. You are alone. You are old. (The young man is brutally truthful.) When you need to make a change, you just make it. You moved to Mazatlan. Then to Etzatlan. And now you are going to move to Oconahua. Alone. You have big, huge courage.”

I know a compliment when I see one so, taking no offense, I said, “Thank you.” Graciously.

However, my mind was quietly thinking otherwise. My mind spit out words such as flighty, loose cannon, loco-loco.

It’s true though. When a situation becomes untenable for various reasons, I’ve learned to make a change. If opportunity beckons elsewhere, I’ve learned to make a change.

Every decision carries its own consequences. For me, that has nothing to do with right or wrong. I could go. I could stay. I could move one step left. Or right.

That sounds so smug and smarmy. It actually took six years of terror, being afraid to do anything, not “allowed” any decisions, to give me the strength to break free. Every move or change since has been relatively easy, easy only in comparison to the years I call “Chicago Time”.

Leo went on to say about himself, “Me, I’m a big chicken. I’m scared to change. Friends tell me I need to break away from here, to get a job to use my education and skills. I’m chicken. I’d love to work in one of the big resorts on the Gulf Coast. I’d be good at helping people, at managing a crew. I would like that work. But my family is important to me. I don’t want to leave family.”

Immediately, I felt guilt. I’m one of the people who’d said, “Go, move, do something for yourself.”

In that moment, I saw that I had been wrong to urge change for Leo. I don’t know what is best for this young man.

“Leo,” I said, “You know what is best for you. You are the only one who knows what is best. If living here, helping us, being here for each of us, for your family, your friends, feeds your soul, who are we to say that’s not enough? You have no idea the value you give us. We don’t express our appreciation as often as we think it. If your circumstances change, if the time comes for you to make a big change, you will know. That is also courage.”

I’ve often thought that in different times or circumstances, Leo would have been a priest. He ministers quietly, without fanfare, to us, to his family, his neighbors. If you want to see the consequences of his ministry, just take a short trip into town with him. Everybody knows Leo. Leo gives of himself, no matter where he is. That is who he is.

Fool? Wise? Chicken? Courageous? By whose definition? Might be this. Might be that.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 19, 2024

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It was a dark and sleepless night.

 

It was a dark and sleepless night.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It was a dark and sleepless night, not a storm cloud in sight.

I did the usual when I don’t sleep. I gazed out the window. Turned from my right side to my left side. Threw back the blanket. Turned from my left side to my right side. Pulled up the blanket and tucked it around me, a cocoon. Too many times.

Sensible people, I am told, get up and do something. Binge on Netflix. Scrub the toilet. Read until their eyeballs fall out. Work an entire book of Sudoku. Drink a bottle of Old Grandad. Do something.

Not me. I lie in bed, very awake, and let my mind entertain me.

My mind thinks it knows everything. It doesn’t. It also thinks it is invincible. It thinks when I die it will go on living. We, me and my mind, have had conversations about this kind of stuff.  

We listened to road traffic. Car. Truck. Car. Big truck with jake brakes. There are a few haulers who like to race up to the first tope (speed bump) and slam the brakes. Evidently that satisfies something in their psyche. I wouldn’t know. I’m not a trucker.

In Etzatlan, I live a block off the highway, just off the edge of town limits.

In Oconahua, I will live on the far side of town, no highway in sight, on a cobble street going up the mountain to nowhere, among the last houses, no traffic. Please, soon.

I listen to the night birds, the tree frogs, to something that might be a kind of cricket.

My mind wants to visit the past. We argue. It wants to visit dark times I want to forget. I want to visit more pleasant memories. Why are the good times harder to hold onto, harder to dredge up the details?

In this tug of war, I roll over and toss off the blanket. Whoosh, a ripe avocado falls from the tree outside my bedroom window, through a crumple of thick leaves making a bumpity racket on the way to a hard landing on the ground.

I hear my dog on night patrol, whiffling along, checking out the disturbance. Dogs eat avocados.

My mind always wants to do a body scan, check for dire diseases. It will find them. I try to stomp that activity down before it gains momentum. An unnoticeable daytime twinge can and will, if fed and pampered, erupt into nighttime pain that only morphine will cure. I know. My mind tells me so.

Roll over, pull up the blanket. Just as my mind slows, almost restful, along comes a bobcat with its distinctive skunky reek. The bobcat sniffed around the tree and passed on to other hunting grounds.

Such was my night. I’ve learned to not fight it, to relax into it, whether this peculiar restlessness brings sleep eventually or not.

Want to hear something strange? I could have come up with any number of real things to worry about to keep me awake.

Real stuff, like health of family and friends, lack of money, questioning right or wrong of past decisions, writing script for if this or if that happens.

The possibility of Mt. Tequila erupting despite lack of activity for centuries, a rogue tsunami crossing a range of mountains and drowning all of us. Mass abduction of our community by aliens. You know, real stuff.

No, I stuck with the mundane, traffic noises, bouncing avocados and a roaming bobcat.

On a sleepless night, there is no understanding the quirks and quarks of my mind.

In the morning, I found on the ground, an avocado for the kitchen along with three seeds, licked clean.

On that sleepless night, it seemed, the whole season turned. I went to bed in summer. Didn’t sleep. Got out of bed in the newly turned fall.

The wind was blowing. Not a Montana wind. But wind enough to bend palm leaves and wave the stretched-out branches of the jacaranda. A cooler wind. A wind that chased the daily 99% humidity down to 50%. Oh, blessed wind.

The air smelled like spices, autumn air.

In the sky white puffs scudded along the blue like pleasure boats in a bay. Not a gray rain cloud in sight. Yesterday was summer. Today is autumn. Tonight I will sleep like a rock.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

September 12, 2024

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wrong Season

 

Wrong Season

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We all get them. This has been our turn. A week fraught with “one thing after another”. The kind of week where the little disasters loom large in shadows of big fears.

My friend Ana in Oconahua had been having stomach pains for a long time, much longer than anybody knew when she finally admitted them and went for tests. Bango—into the hospital she landed, gall bladder surgery. She left minus a body part, with rocks in hand.

She is recovering nicely from the surgery but suffering from the medication. Ana has severe allergies, which is why she was able to ignore the gall bladder pains for so long. She thought the pain her own fault for eating what she shouldn’t eat. Among the long list of allergies, Ana’s body does not tolerate medication but she must use an antibiotic for an intestinal inflammation, no choice. Hence, she is both relieved and miserable, but on the road to recovery.

She lost 20 pounds. I told her, not to worry or go searching. I found them.

Seriously, and actually, Ana is a little bitty woman but once she can eat again, surely her body will adjust.

My daughter, Dee Dee, was hit with acute vertigo. Unlike her mother, she tends to not speak in superlatives, yet she reports that half the town has West Nile and the other half has Norovirus. Her symptoms are along the West Nile variety.

I urged her to get a blood test. She stumbled into the ER, since all the clinics were closed, and stumbled right back out. Standing room only in the waiting area. Had Dee Dee stayed, surely she would have left with a multitude of other ailments.

My daughter is in bed, staying hydrated, pretty much immobilized, hoping to outlast and stabilize her whirling world.

Lesser problems abound. Broken water pumps, leaking roofs, equipment malfunctions, a broken lawn mower, a weed-whacker quit whacking. Every wheel-barrow on the Rancho had flat tires, I kid you not. Frustrations, all.

At my house, Leo broke the handle on my favorite shovel. Not that I’m the one usually using the shovel. This is a short shovel with a good spade. The rod is topped with a cup-shaped plastic handle. The plastic handle broke. Split open like a rotten tomato.

Don’t tell me plastic doesn’t rot. It may not break down into dust but I deal with rotten plastic constantly. I move a bucket of chilis and the lip of the bucket comes away in my hand. Happens regularly.

In frustration, after deciding to have a blacksmith fashion a new metal handle for my shovel, I buried the blade in a pot of bamboo and said to Leo, “There. Maybe it will grow a new handle. Everything else grows.”

Leo seriously contemplated the shovel a good half a minute, shook his head, and said, “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Wrong season,” Leo replied.

Not to be outdone in the Sympathy Stakes, I am here to announce I have cancer in my left forefinger. You might look at my finger and say, “Looks like a patch of little bumps here on the first joint, oh, and here at the base.”

“Yes,” I say. “Tumors.”

You might reply, “Look like spider bites.”

In return, I might say, “They are driving me nuts. I’m sure they are tumors. They itch, they hurt, I can hardly use that finger. Cancer. What if I have to have my finger amputated?”

You could at least pat me on the shoulder and say, “Poor baby. Here. Put some Bag Balm on it. Cures everything.”

Sondra Ashton

HDN:  Looking out my back door

September rainy week

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________