Nearing the end his life, he's not worried about eternity More than sixteen years ago, when we had bought the land but not yet begun construction, a small stray dog showed up at the gate merrily wagging his tail as if we were all old friends. We started to feed him each morning and for …
Author: Alfredo Lanier
My husband and I live on an off-the-grid ranch outside San Miguel, along with the challenging but dear company of four off-the-street dogs and three cats. My interests lie in politics, writing, photography and sundry forms of spirituality.
The Nativity Reinvented
New Takes on An Age-old story There have been countless iterations of the story of the birth Jesus Christ since it occurred more than two thousand years ago, I suspect to account for the many logical loose ends in the narrative: An unmarried teenage girl named Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit and gives …
Peep, Peep, Hooray?
A story about how a best laid plan went awry On Saturday morning, animated chirping came from under a plastic tarp that covered a pile of firewood. Curiosity then led Stew to check the source and discover one of our hens guarding a group of seven chicks, one of them hatched so recently its plumage …
torture by Hacking
Three days at the mercy of internet crooks Not even twenty-four hours after returning from Peru, I received a strange phone call that should have been a red flag but which I ignored because of either jet lag, stupidity or both. I didn't recognize the caller's Spanish accent, dripping with fake concern and assumed he …
Up in the Air
A weekend when Everyday Worries Floated away Every day we're pelted with so much alarming news—political wars, dire predictions and yesterday, even a report of a tsunami—that you are left feeling like someone caught bare-assed in a hailstorm. Some friends have concocted escape mechanisms, most commonly going on a "news fast," or in my case, …
The smells of spring
We'll take the rain no matter what it smells like "Petrichor" is one of those five-dollar words that you might fling at someone you are trying to impress, or put off, at a church picnic. It describes the earthy, pleasant smell when rain dampens dry soil. This morning on the way to the coop to …
The clothes of our lives
What we've worn, never to be worn again When Stew and I moved down from Chicago some twenty years ago, the packing began in an orderly fashion, boxes clearly labeled and sealed—books, tools, kitchen utensils and such—but we were nowhere finished when the crew from United Van Lines showed up. The pace of the packing …
Chicken Liberation
A cluck-cluck here and a cluck-cluck there Several years ago, Stew and I came upon a traffic accident we didn't quickly forget. A semi-truck filled with what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of chickens caged in wire compartments had just overturned and its load had turned into a bloody pile of dead and wounded …
morning breaks at the ranch
When you live in the country, driving home on a lonely road after dark is scary. Sometimes it makes us wonder why we didn't pick a place in-town to live, easily accessible by an Uber or kind friends who would take us home. No, we're not afraid of roving narcotraffickers, highway robbers, bandidos or other …
Learning to speak in tongues
The most important trick is a dash of chutzpah After watching my mom struggle with English when she came from Cuba, Stew go mano a mano with Spanish after we moved to Mexico 20 years ago, and my own experiences learning English at age 14, I've concluded that neither perfect grammar nor a flawless pronunciation …
El Rancho Santa Clara 