Magdalena García is a fellow Cuban refugee and a Presbyterian minister who performed an act of kindness I'll never forget when my mom died twelve years ago. She organized and conducted a beautiful memorial service at her church in Chicago, with music, flowers and a moving eulogy, after the Roman Catholic parish to which I …
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.
A killing, then a coronation
Killing the queen bee in your hive is nasty business, nearly as bad as cleaning the mess after putting the honey in jars. This little creature, about an inch long, spends a couple of years, maybe less, frenetically flitting around deep inside the hive laying thousands of eggs that engender the thousands of bees that …
When people turn off their light
Sundays Stew and I attend a free-form church service that compared to a traditional religious to-do looks more like an informal gathering around a coffee table decorated with a dozen votive candles and a sprinkling of bougainvillea petals plucked from bushes outside the door. The program is a one-pager whose order and content can vary from …
Senior Alert: The Metamucil Threat
It's not as far-reaching or sinister a crisis as say, the Benghazi cover-up, but folks over sixty-five, particularly those with not much else to do, might consider our latest domestic conundrum: Can Metamucil or its chief ingredient, an herb named Plantago Psyllium, harm your dishwasher?This crisis started a couple of months ago when we visited …
Why do we keep on traveling?
For all the breakthroughs in communications—how did people ever buy plane tickets or make hotel reservations before the Internet?—travel is still a bone-wearying affair especially for people like Stew and me who are well past the age of pretending to enjoy spending the evening at a hostel with erratic hot water and deodorant-challenged guests.Two days …
Latest from Rafael Loreno
Even though the highs remain in the mid-80s, the sun is getting higher in the sky and beating more fiercely. Remember, the altitude at the ranch is about 7,000 feet and San Miguel is quite a bit closer to the equator than most of the U.S.So Félix's hats have been getting gradually larger and wider …
The weight of things and people past
Contrary to all the advice to leave most of our belongings behind when we moved to Mexico, a semi-trailer nearly full of furniture, books, kitchen utensils and china, garden tools, pictures and unidentified "stuff" followed us down here. It wasn't even an act of conscious hoarding: Stew and I became so frustrated and enraged trying …
Roaring good news from Mother Nature
Although the beginning of the rainy season is still a good six weeks away, late last night we had an auspicious preview: A roaring wham-boom-bang of a thunder and lightning storm like I hadn't seen or heard for a long time, followed by about forty minutes of very heavy rain. Thunderstorms in the countryside are …
Up my very tangled family tree
When I visited Cuba in 1998 to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II for the Chicago Tribune I stumbled onto a few surprising branches of my family tree, including relatives I'd heard about but had never met and who appeared to be loyal and highly placed apparatchiks. They lived quite comfortably in an …
Tale of a nervous Good Samaritan
How are your abuelitos doing I asked Félix last week. His grandparents have been on my mind ever since Stew and I brought them a Christmas despensa, a holiday shopping bag of groceries containing flour for tortillas, corn husks for tamales, cooking oil, sugar and other Mexican staples that we supplemented with a couple of packages of …
El Rancho Santa Clara 