Mexico: A Love Story

It’s the Dog Days of Summer here.

I mean it’s hot.

See this picture? That’s pretty much just what 109 degrees looks like.

Lucky for me, Dave’s up in Berkeley for a few days, and girls, you know what that means.

No cooking. No nada.

And certainly, no hauling myself off this mountain—where even here it reached 97 degrees today—to go to the markets in Fresno.

Now, if I’d run out of martini olives, we might have an emergency, but I have the gin, the vermouth, the olives, the glass AND the shaker in the refrigerator. All is well.

We go through this for a couple of weeks in the summer, and its not so bad if you have about zero expectations that you’ll get anything done.

I water the garden in the morning and after that, the plants—which are looking shaggy, bedraggled and downright sad—are on their own.

Back in the shuttered darkness of my room after all the watering is done and with the little window air-conditioner purring loudly, I reach for this wonderful book I’ve been reading called Mexico: A Love Story—Women Write about the Mexican Experience, because who wouldn’t want to be at a beach like this in 100 degree weather even if only in her mind?

Well, this book—edited by Camille Cusumano— pulled me back into my youth so fast, back to a time when I was wandering around all of those places like these writers, falling in love, renting funky beach hotels, just as brave (or dumb) and full of wonder, feeling as if all this bounty had been put there just pour moi, or para mi, as the case would be.

(Oh and Lynda? If you’re reading this blog, get the book, read the story that begins on page 129 and call me! Seriously!)

In one of the memoirs by Laura Resau— Bees Born of Tears— a woman visits a Oaxacan curandera for a spiritual cleansing. As bees swarm around her and the ancient curandera, the healer’s daughter tells the author the bees are their spririts, that they have met before and have brought the two women together again.

Resau writes of that moment: “The wings inside my chest move, I can feel them. They move with a thrill, a sense of discovering layers of meaning like ribbons intermingling in the wind. They move with the sudden knowledge that the world is a strange, deep rich place.”

I swear that happens to me in Mexico, too. It’s why I keep going back.

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