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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Comings and Goings

Comings and Goings

            They flapped a clamor like rain drumming on my roof. The day is sunny and bright. Overhead, a gigantic thundercloud of blackbirds shadowed the sky in annual migration.

I like to imagine these are the same blackbirds I see gathering in the wheat fields around Havre in September, eating grain, preparing for the 2,500 mile flight south. I will see these flocks daily until spring, moving between feeding grounds in the valley and night perches in the hills.

Jim was here with his 95-year old mother, Juanita, for a week. He wanted her to see this part of the country he loves. We all fell in love with this delightful woman.

One day, while she and I sat in the Plaza, another wrinkled woman, one I see frequently in town, a woman near the same age as Juanita, walked over and lay her hand on Juanita’s shoulder. The two women, mirror images, leaned, round heads face to face and congratulated one another on such a long life, gabling back and forth, each in her own language, no barrier to understanding.

Juanita said she knew she would never have another chance for such a trip. She tires easily but she is sharp as a tack and loves to tell her stories. She paused in the middle of one such story, obviously frustrated. “Oh,” she shook her head. “Sometimes words forget me.”

She is back in St. Louis. We told Jim he could go home and leave his mother here. But, I know we wore her out and she is glad to be home, in her own bed. Jim plans to return in January, depending on his mother’s health, of course.

The same day Jim and Juanita boarded an outbound plane, Pat and Nancie arrived from Sedro Woolley, Washington and Julie flew in from the Twin Cities. We are wearing paths through the grass between casitas, visiting, welcoming. 

Crin has been here three weeks. She leaves in a few days. Single women, living across the road from one another, we often share a meal. Crin will return in February for a longer stay, perhaps a couple months. I will miss her. Everyone else here is partnered up.

If I could, I would send you my crop of avocados and iguanas.  My tree is large and loaded. I began eating from it in August and it still drops several a day. By the end of its crop, I do not care if I ever see another avocado. I pick dropped avocados off the ground in the morning and hike them over to the neighbors in rotation, every other day keeping one for myself.

Iguanas? They love avocados and chomp all but the seed. Often I see or hear a fat iguana, belly full, slip and fall from the tree, mouth full of pulp. My flowers are safe from foraging, for now.

 Today my great-granddaughter, Kyla, the baby, is in the hospital in Billings for a bone-marrow test. If I could, I would take unto myself the entire family pain. Instead I have my own helplessness, my confusion, my questions, my anger.

If I could I would flap wings like a blackbird, fly against the cold and snow and bitter winter winds, and like a fairy godmother or a witch, who cares which, wave my magic wand and make life sparkle.

Which one of us would not do likewise for those we love? But that is fantasy. 

Why does it take pain to motivate me to do something I know is good? I get lazy, break the good habit. Last week I began anew, beginning anew, dedicating the first hour of morning to meditation. The first hour. If I set any different time, I set up myself to fail.

The first hour, as the sun is rising, is for me, for you, for all my children. Maybe I cannot make anything different or better. But I can find ease for my own heart. Who knows? Life is a Great Mystery.

After meditation, I drink my morning coffee, pick avocados, dead-head geraniums, mop my floor, watch blackbirds, walk across the little dirt road and visit a neighbor. Some days I go to the Plaza.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November 1, 2018