My World and Welcome To It

 

My World and Welcome To It 

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My world is all I have to share. My world is ordinary. It is not much of a gift. Since it is all I have to give, I gladly welcome you through my doorway.

Take today. I got up on the “wrong side of bed” so to speak. Instead of getting up when I woke up, I let myself go back to sleep “for just a few minutes”. It’s not like I have a schedule. When I did get out of bed, much later, I felt like I was living in a vat of molasses in January, every movement forced through a fugue state.  You ever done that?

Walk dog. Make coffee. Slog through my morning reading, good stuff but with a presentation dry as dust. Seems to fit my day.

My daughter calls on her hands-free phone on her way to work; our chat part of our morning routine. Suddenly I interrupt her. I hear a whap of wings, and the black-bottomed whistling ducks fly over my wall into my neighbor’s tree, first the female, then the male.    

And just like that, my world of woe turns upside down. (Or is that right side up?) “The whistling ducks are back. The ducks are back!” I shouted and laughed. Inside me, I sang and danced.

These ducks delight me. These strange and beautiful ducks have a distinct whistle-call and nest in trees. I’ve watched them return to set up summer housekeeping every year.

I won’t say they are the most intelligent of ducks. They return to the same tree, to the same hollow where at one time years ago, a large branch was cut off. Every year I watch them nest and lay eggs in the hollow. Every year I watch the iguanas climb up the tree and eat the duck eggs.

One year this pair of black-bottomed whistling ducks laid two clutches of eggs before giving up, flying back over my wall the other direction into the huge tree in Lani’s yard, a tree whose branches spread to cover more area than the average city lot, a tree which houses numerous varieties of birds, seasonal tourists as well as residents.

It is spring here as well as there. My day fills and ends with birdsong and cicada shrill. Well, it is difficult for me to call cicada racket a song, but then the world is filled with all kinds of song so who am I to judge.

The cicadas are early, quite early, this year. Local lore has it that they sing down the rains. Oh, please, let the rains come early too.

Among the songs and sounds, the roosters’ crows punctuate the airwaves. It is a myth that roosters crow when the sun comes up. They sound off any and every hour of the day and night. It is by happenstance when their crow coincides with sunrise.

And the donkey. The neighboring donkey is further away from us than his piercing, intrusive bray sounds. That’s all I need say about the donkey. The two burros next door have gentle voices in comparison.

The whistling ducks are still atop the tree, preening and posturing. My daughter and I are still exchanging yesterday’s news. She pulls into her friend Vicki’s coffee stand for our morning treat. Dee Dee generally orders a honey bee latte, iced, and I mull over the special of the day for my virtual coffee. Today it is caramel macchiato. Perfect. A sweet drink for a sweet day.

I thank Vickie for the drink as my daughter prepares to drive to her office. I hear Vickie yell back, “Bye, Mom.” I love that. It’s a marvelous day in my world when the whistling ducks return.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 19, 2022

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Well, Change My Mind!

 

Well, Change My Mind!

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Two weeks ago a shepherd dog running full speed body slammed into my knee. Maiming me was not Chebella’s intent. She was fleeing from my Lolita, half her size, but in full protect-my-mistress mode. Size means nothing in dog world. Lola still quivers, after all these months, when Snowball, an ancient, tottering mini-poodle, growls when we walk past her people.

No bones were broken. The doc sent me home to bed and chair. The first week flowed rather smoothly. Leo showed up every morning to make me coffee and water my extensive garden. I don’t realize how extensive my garden has become until I can’t go out to check it.

Neighbors, Crin and Kathy, along with Leo, kept me fed with all my needs catered. I assiduously followed doctor’s orders, not because I wanted to but because pain forced me.

Day by day the pain is less except when I forget and try to take a step without support.

A week, to the day, everything changes, my comfy world implodes. Kathy, Richard and Crin leave for sandy beaches. Leo phones to say he has all the symptoms of the other Big C, Covid. “Stay away. Get tested,” I say. He does. Flu is flu is flu. He has the regular one.

Now I am back to full quarantine and on my own to feed and water myself. I would not want to pass any flu to any friend. I know I can do it. This is not my first solo bronc ride. Slowly. Carefully. Little by little.

I rub soothing gel into my leg. The bruise from knee to ankle looks like dark storm clouds in the west, carrying hail.

Oh, hail. That reminds me, my garden will die without water. I can feed me but I cannot water my plants. With temps in the upper 90s, all my buckets on concrete, my entire crop is doomed. I remember hailstones wiping swaths through acres of wheat. I know it is not the same thing, but this small disaster looms huge to me. Doomed. Flowers and vegetables. Doomed. My beautiful garden a barren wasteland.

Poor Lola. She sits by the door, whimpers. I talk to her. What does she understand? I fill her food and water dishes but no walks, no outside sits and no fun. In my absence she becomes super-watchdog, barking at friend and foe.

Oops. Lola was supposed to take her worm pill last week. I watch her scratch her belly. Oh, yeah. She hasn’t had her flea drops either. Poor Lola. Sitting, whimpering. I watch the flesh drop off her skeleton. Doomed.

My house. My poor house that I just deep-cleaned, overtaken with dust bunnies, the floor, the corners, every surface crying out for attention I cannot give. Pig sty. Bricks crumble to dust. Doomed.

I open my refrigerator. The shelves are almost bare. I’ve not been eating much, not been buying much. Now I’m doomed to beans and rice. The flesh falls from my own skeleton. I waste away in my chair, covered in cobwebs. Doomed.

Good thing I am in quarantine. I have only four more days of clean clothing. I will rummage in my laundry basket for my cleanest dirty shirt. Ewww. Nobody will want to get near me. Ewww. Stinky. Abandoned. Doomed.

My mind is wonderfully creative and inventive. Within hours after my friends drove off to the beach and Leo phoned with his bad news, I had doomed my garden, my dog, my house and my own self.

Fortunately I am aware of propensities to run-away imagination. So I did a simple thing. Not easy. Simple. I changed my mind. I let it go.

Somehow, life usually works out, often not the way I’d like, but life happens without my interference.

Ana and Michelle showed up outside my door. “We heard. We are shopping in town. What do you need? What can we bring you?”

My refrigerator hummed coolness around fresh fruits and veggies. Lola was wormed and flea-ed. A load of laundry hung on the clothesline. “We’ll be back. If you need us, call.”

Josue came to my door after he’d finished his workday. “What do you need?” He brought my sun-dried, fresh and clean, laundry off the clothesline for me. He changed my empty drinking water jug for fresh water.

In the mornings, Josue shows up early and waters everything, flowers, veggies and herbs in pots, trees in the yard.

My house? Don’t be silly. I just finished a deep clean. It’s not that bad. It will wait for me.

My own self? Day by day, I’m on the mend. I have friends galore. My only enemy is my own mind. 

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 12, 2022

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I Got Pruned

 

I Got Pruned

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Any person raised on the Montana Plains knows how precious is every sprout, blade or leaf of green. Precious. We baby each new evidence of life, coddle it, rejoice when it survives the season.

Living here in central Mexico with year-round green, flowers, fruits, one learns to do differently.

I had to discover how to prune all manner of precious greenery before they morphed into Audrey, the blood-sucking terror from “Little Shop of Horrors” and took over my whole garden world.

It ain’t easy, Babe. But I learned, slowly. In the beginning I cringed with each chop of the secateurs. I could be heard to mutter, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Or, “You will thank me for this someday.” Sound familiar, anyone?

Eventually pruning becomes second nature. The plumbago, beautiful in blue, was growing out of bounds. That is a big job, one for Leo, our gardener. Me, I grabbed my tool and snipped off great strips of basil, marjoram, and oregano from my bucket garden. Then I pruned seed heads from some flowers. Small jobs, easily done. Since I have fresh herbs year-round, the debris went into the garden trash.

That done, I walked over to Kathy’s to see her progress with making a mosaic of chips of broken traditional clay tiles around the base of her wood-fired pizza oven.

Now I’ll tell you the story of how I got pruned and my downfall.

After my visit, before I went home, I stood outside Kath’s brick wall with wrought iron topper, talking with Kathy and her sister across the way, framed in her kitchen window.

Chebella, Bonnie’s dog from the campground next door, came around the corner and trotted up toward the bend in the road, where my dog, Lola, was sniffing all the wondrous dog stories.

Oh, no, you don’t, this from Lola. You go back to your own territory. And Lola went on the chase, loudly. Chebella took one dog-instant to read the situation, turned tail and ran her forty-pound body full bore between the wall and me, slamming my knee “ooof” on from the side, pushing it a direction knees are not meant to bend.

I saw it coming and grabbed the iron above the wall, hung on, and body-slammed into the wall but stayed upright-ish. Kathy ran and grabbed an ice-pack and Crin hustled over with a chair. I sat. I iced. Meanwhile, Leo, hearing the commotion, came to investigate. He went off to scout out my old frame walker I’d put in storage for whomever needs it.

With the walker, I figured I’d get myself home to bed, continue with ice and in a few hours I’d be fine.

Ha. One step forward disabused me of that notion. “Chair.” I screamed. “Ice.” I sat, I iced. “Leo, please get me to the Hospital Paris for an X-Ray.” It warn’t easy, my friends.

But a couple hours later I returned having been doctored, rayed, shot with pain killer, given a splinted brace and anti-inflammatory medicine plus orders to do nothing for a couple weeks.

You know how we are. That first day I stayed gratefully in bed, thinking about my pruning activities of earlier. My plants down here often sigh with gratitude for not having to hold up the heavy load of leaf, flower, seed and fruit. It’s a relief to them to be pruned. They grow better.

The second day, like a plant, I could look forward to new growth, as I shuttled between bed and chair. Meanwhile friends and neighbors keep me fed and watered.

The third day I had figured I’d be well. You know. Up and at ‘em. Raring to go. Ja, ja, ja, ja. (That is laughter in Espanol; think disparaging laughter.)

Days later I’m wondering if it might take two weeks or more like the doc said. That’s me shown.

I feel discouraged. I feel grateful no bones were broken. I’m very thankful for my friends and neighbors.

I feel pruned. And I want to tell you, it hurt me more than it hurt you!

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 5, 2022

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My face is red.

 

      My face is red.

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Yesterday the four of us women who are here on the rancho went to Oconahua to share pot luck with Ana and Michelle, and to meet Michelle’s sister Janice.

My neighbor Janet and I have been to their home several times. This was the first for Kathy and Crinny so it was really special for them to see the lovely and incredible stone house the Ana and Michelle built over eleven years.

We each introduced ourselves to Janice, me being last in line. “Hi, Janice. I’m so delighted to meet you. I’m Sondra.”

“Oh, I remember you,” Janice said. Italics are mine but I swear I heard them in her voice. “Years ago your neighbor brought us to see your house and you were not happy with us. We were there to walk through and look at the houses that were empty at the time. She wanted to show us your house and yard.”

Oh, yes, memory returned with a whump in my stomach. I’d thought of that day from time to time, with chagrin, wishing I’d been more amiable.

That morning my neighbor had shown up trailed by three or four women, all strangers to me. It was a couple or three years later until I really met two of those strangers, now my good friends from Oconahua.

 On the day of my infamy, I’d not lived here in Etzatlan long. For several months I lived without kitchen cabinets or sink, hauled my dishes outside to the patio sink to wash up, lived out of bins and stacks on the floor.

Nothing about my house was finished nor was it a show place. And the day in reference, I was hot and sweaty, cleaning cloth in hand.

She meant well, my neighbor. But she also had come tromping through my yard to get to the two houses beyond me. And I took offense. Churlish of me. Rude and presumptuous of her.

And I said, “No.” I also asked her to take her entourage around and not through my yard. I didn’t say this meanly, but I said it clearly. And I do remember it.

I apologized profusely to Janice who laughed and said, “Think nothing of it. It was understandable.”

Interestingly, I liked Janice immediately. I let my memories and embarrassment drop to the floor and carried on with visiting. I hope she found me to be more approachable than last time but I can’t control what other people think.

Today the “girls from Oconahua,” and I always think that phrase to the tune of “The girl from Ipanema” are stopping by for the quick tour of all our homes now. Janice had seen most of our houses when empty.

I’ll invite them in. Me and my house are ready. They’ll see me same as you would if you dropped by without calling. The ironing board is out and a sewing project is on the table.

My house is small. But it is pleasant and inviting. People tend to walk in and automatically make themselves at home. I like that.

I’ll be more gracious than that other time. Ana and Michelle have been here often. They know me well. Janice will see the everyday me in my everyday setting.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 28, 2022

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Building a Sturdy Spite Fence

 

Building a Sturdy Spite Fence

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Unfortunately, I have friends stuck in a spite fight. As is often the case, one party is bewildered while the other party is self-righteously sticking pins in voodoo dolls, metaphorically speaking.

I’m the onlooker.

There is nothing I can do but watch it unfold. I feel sad. I know about spite. And I know who spite hurts. Not so much the intended victim, who often is unaware.

My first clear and vivid memory of my own spiteful action occurred when I was five or six years old. My Grandma made me share my favorite doll with my little sister. Okay. Sharing is good. But I was not allowed to play with my sister’s dolls. Catch the righteousness here?

I showed her. I cut the fingers off my favorite little rubber doll. So there! Play with her now!

Who did I hurt? Well, it wasn’t my sister who had to live with both a disabled doll and that ugly memory of spite.

My next most shameful and cringe-worthy memory is from high school and over a member of the opposite sex. Rightly or wrongly, I thought, rumor being such a marvelous tool, that she was after him and I had him! This is embarrassing to admit. I flaunted it in her face.

Immediately I felt shame and remorse. My behavior was despicable and I knew it. A part of me slunk away and died from that experience.

High school romances are fleeting but memory is forever. Fortunately I paid attention. I did not like those feelings of inner ugliness. Again, who did my spite hurt? Me.

Years later, I was moving house and my male helper was whingeing and whining. I showed him. Remember when television sets were huge, awkward, a 30-inch square box weighing half as much as myself? I wrapped my arms around that sucker, the television, not the guy, and stomped it down the long, narrow stairway, across the alley and slung it over the side into the pick-up. The guy was oblivious to my righteousness and my anger but my spine screamed, hyper-aware, for days.

Memories are painful. Learning often hurts. But these memories taught me a lot about myself, my own tendencies to righteousness and urge to get even for slights, real or imagined. For the most part I’ve been able to keep a lid on those tendencies.

 So it pains me when I see someone I love building a spite fence. Metaphorical or built with brick and razor wire, a spite fence works. It keeps one party righteous in indignation and anger at wrongs, real or imagined. It keeps the other party from opening communication, from attempting to solve what might once have been a solvable problem.

Everybody loses. The neighbors on either side of the spite fence lose friendship and trust. The fenced in neighbor loses sleep for a few nights but that will pass. The fence builder loses sleep too, ever vigilant to find more reasons for hate and anger, nightly reviewing and revising each possibility.

The reasons are very real. “He looked at me.” “He didn’t speak to me.” “He pushed ahead of me in line.” Think grade school.

Me, the onlooker. I lose too. I lose at least one friend. There is nothing I can do. I tried. This isn’t the first spite fence flung in the way of communication between these people.

Once, a few years ago, I asked the perpetrator, “How does that make you feel.”

“I feel great,” the answer. The words from his mouth and the expression on his face did not match.

Alrighty then.

There are a lot of kinds and examples of spite fences. My favorite, from a farmer in Utah.  He planted a row of old vehicles nose down along the boundary of his farm and a new housing development, after his new neighbors complained of farm dust and animal smells. He called it “Redneck Stonehenge”.

I hope his story had a happy ending. Neighbors got the message, were able to say, “Oh, well, sure, I chose to live next to a farm.” And perhaps the farmer uprooted his fence, easy to plant, easy to remove.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 21, 2022

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Pay de pimiento morron and other wonders

 

            Pay de pimiento morron and other wonders

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In the space of a few days I’ve transformed from a hermit grub to social butterfly.

It all began when John and Carol invited me to please, please, please join them for a lunch before they headed off into the sunrise back to Minnesota. I had turned down numerous such invitations during these last months, just not comfortable being out in the greater community.

When you come to visit we will take you to spend an afternoon walking the grounds of the Hacienda del Carmen, a beautifully restored historic ranch with centuries-old buildings, where we went for lunch. After a wonderful meal we chose to go whole-hoggish and have dessert.

I like to taste foods new to me. One item on the menu was pay de pimiento morron which translates to bell-pepper pie. How could I resist? Well, I didn’t resist one bite. In looks, the slice of pie resembles pumpkin. In taste, it is its own yummy self.

Now my challenge is to recreate the pie and I’m fairly certain I’m up to the challenge.

In response to a comment by Michelle, I arranged a woman-time visit one morning, no men allowed. Over scones and coffee, five of us spent a couple hours noshing and laughing and generally relaxing, masks hanging from one ear while eating. It was all good.

Speaking of ears, has anybody else noticed how one’s ears grow larger as one ages? I used to have these cute little ears and am appalled at how large they have grown. Insult on top of injury, they don’t hear better being larger, in fact, well, huh, sorry, could you please repeat that.

From ears to toes, I know I have arthritis, but why do my toes look different at night, swollen and gnarly. In the morning they look normal. They pain me differently at night too.  

I just had a birthday, so I suppose that is where some of these observations originate.

Nature or nurture? Where does the urge for a thorough, deep, spring cleaning originate?

I can’t say I like the process but I do get a great satisfaction from the afterglow.

Procrastination works for me for weeks. Then one morning I wake up and find I’ve begun the process without conscious thought. Which happened this week.

Opposed to my normal “I’ll-do-it-myself”, I hired Leo to do the heavy, high and hard.

I “hid the keys” to the ladder and step stools from myself. It’s that birthday thing. My nature is to show you I can still do it. Or is it the fear thing? Fear of falling? Or is it that when I hid the keys I found my right mind?

At any rate it is getting done, little by little, and I’m grateful for the help. Along the way I brilliantly invented a cleaning tool, my million-dollar idea of the day and you are welcome to it gratis.

I no longer want to get down on the floor to scrub those lower shelves or that corner cabinet where we all shove the least used utensils. I can get onto the floor. It is the getting up that is awkward.

First I researched the market and found that the closest thing available to what I want is a toilet brush, which will not do at all. My desired tool doesn’t exist, at least not in Mexico which I must say has more cleaning products and whichits than anywhere I’ve ever been.

So I invented a new tool. I bought a new cotton mop, measured and marked the ideal spot to cut the handle and took the mop to Josue. I had him cut the handle and shape and sand the cut end. Then I carefully trimmed the twisted cotton strands to make a shorter mop head.

I’ve got to say my new tool works slickity-wickity, even more useful than I imagined.

Nature? Or nurture? I suppose we’d each answer differently. For me, after much thought while scrubbing out those once-a-year places, I found my answer. Grandma and Guilt, equal measures, possibly one and the same thing.

I’ll leave you with those thoughts to chew on while I go wash the bedroom windows.

What? Oh, the pie. I used the custard base of pumpkin pie with alterations: less pulp than with pumpkin pie, piloncillos for sugar. After you roast the peppers, whiz them in the blender. Carefully add seasonings to taste. I used cinnamon, cloves and a bit of allspice. It worked deliciously.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 14, 2022

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Go with the flow

 

Go with the flow 

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Remember those words from long ago?  I glance at tee-shirts on computer side-bar ads, and see that phrases from when I was young and innocent, or at least oblivious, our phrases are making a comeback.

So go with the flow even if you’ve no idea what it means.

I remember during a particularly tough few years when my mantra (I didn’t know the word mantra back then.) was “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”. I thought if I said it often enough the words would magically seep into my hard head with complete understanding. To me the two phrases mean much of the sameness.

Crin told me early this morning that her day is filled with “maybes”. Maybe she and her sister Kathy would go to Guadalajara to pick up the car they are buying. Maybe the paperwork would be ready. Maybe the insurance would be in place. Maybe the work items would be finished.

In other words, a day like any other. Go with the flow.

We sprang forward with the dread time-change Sunday so this week I’m indulging myself in a few days of grumbling. There is never enough time.

My own plans today are rather nebulous but include baking a batch of bread and mopping the floors.

But before I start any project, I can see that I absolutely must harvest lettuce from one of my buckets.

On the way to the lettuce bucket, I have to stop to allow the jasmine to permeate every cell of my being. I know if you close your eyes, you can smell the sweet jasmine all the way where you are. 

The bucket of recently planted zucchini will be giving me first fruits by the weekend along with a treat of fried squash blossoms. A tiny lizard has resided in the bucket for several days now, so I give it my blessing. “Eat bugs; eat plenty bugs,” I suggest.

Then I have to fuss over the rhubarb, now several stalks strong. Instructions say don’t harvest any rhubarb the first growing year but I don’t know if I’ll be disciplined enough to obey that order. Just the thought of making a sauce with even three or four crisp stalks and pouring the sauce over a bowl of vanilla ice-ream makes my mouth water.

Mmmm. Ice-cream. I’ve not indulged my sweet longing for the cool treat all these weeks. Easter is a mere few days away. I can do it. I like the discipline of denying myself a few pleasures for Lent. It’s not a religious thing with me. I’m not holy nor assured a place with the angels. I like the discipline of Lent. I’m selective about my disciplines. Aren’t you?

Obviously I haven’t eaten breakfast yet so salad for breakfast seems to be in order. I cut enough leafy lettuce for a huge salad. I grab two small tomatoes from my perpetual-tomato bucket.

A peek in the refrigerator gave me the rest of the fixings, an apple and cheese still good for today. Onion, sweet red pepper, a smidge of cheese and chopped pecans filled out the rest of the salad bowl and my stomach.

I’ve hardly blinked, it seems, and the time fast-forwarded to mid-afternoon. My bread dough has transformed from a mound in the big blue ceramic bowl to nicely shaped loaves in the bread pans, waiting for the final step into the oven.

Now I get to make a choice. I can mop the floor or finish this hardest-jigsaw-puzzle-in-the-world which I’ve been working on for three weeks. The picture is an owl swooping over the shores of a marsh. Sounds simple, right? The entire puzzle is composed of lines with variations of three colors. Each piece is shaped the same, two innies and two outies. In early days, four pieces in place were cause for celebration.

In Spanish a jigsaw puzzle is called a rompecabezas which roughly translates “breaks my head” and the word is apt. I love puzzles, the different space my mind occupies when indulging, and I’m good at color and space. This one broke my head. I’ve about a hundred pieces left.

Which would you choose? Mop the floors? Finish the puzzle?

There it is, puzzle finished. I’ll wipe off those little drips of butter from the warm bread which smeared the last five pieces. I’ll mop tomorrow. That’s discipline. That’s the flow.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 7, 2022

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