After two seasons of lackluster performances, this year our raised beds and the other vegetable garden at one corner of our ranch finally put on a show. It's a bit overwhelming, like sitting front row center at a vaudeville extravaganza, with chorus girls, clowns, comedians and jugglers all coming at you at once.There's been nothing …
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.
Countryside tour, includes dead body!
The church Stew and I attend, a non-denominational enterprise with a sketchy doctrinal corpus but a strong commitment to good works in small villages surrounding San Miguel, had organized an outing to Fajardo de Bocas, located about ten miles from our ranch, to inspect a domestic gray-water treatment plant some members had built at a …
All of a sudden yet so late in coming
The coincidences almost added up to a trifecta. On June 26 the U.S. Supreme Court announced two decisions that greatly advanced, though not quite endorsed, marriage equality for same-sex couples in the U.S. Two days later was the forty-fourth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York, an event that many regard as the beginning …
When even what is shouldn't be
Being neither a Southerner nor a rider, I'm not about to get on any preachy high horse about the Paula Deen debacle. I admit to being mystified, though, how an extremely savvy and wealthy businesswoman, no matter how distraught she might feel or what part of the country she comes from, could drop a grammatical …
In Praise of Occasional Trash
Kindle tablets allow you to "sample" books from Amazon and peek at the first fifteen or so pages before committing the twelve or fifteen bucks it might cost to download the entire thing. It's a system that invites intellectual pretense.I might run across a book reviewed by the New York Times that sounds like it …
Peeing Puppies and Privacy
Leave it to our new puppy Roxy to finally get me worked up about the growing intrusions into my private life by the government as well as internet and electronic communication providers.I don't know if it's political fatigue, laziness or a surge in my Buddhist mindfulness but recently I had been ignoring even major political …
A surprise-filled day
What started out a week ago as a quick run to pick up a load of compost from a neighbor's horse ranch, by the end of the day had led to us to meet another Chicagoan who's lived in San Miguel for twenty-two years and, most unexpected, to adopt a three-month-old puppy.The neighbor's ranch—make that …
Paging Dr. de León
Just as Florida gets ready to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Ponce de León's search for the Fountain of Youth—supposedly somewhere in the northern part of the state—out comes Smithsonian magazine in its June issue with an article saying the legend is baloney. In fact, according to a University of South Florida researcher, a political …
An un-Civil Kind of Post
Pity Susan, whoever she might be. I don't know her last name or even if she actually lives in San Miguel. For all I know, Susan might be a pseudonym for a guy from Nebraska named Irving.All I know is that this mythical Susan-person is the moderator of the Civil List, an internet bulletin board …
Booze and the campo
As much as I have tried to understand the lifestyles of the folks who live in the small towns surrounding the ranch—by visiting with them, giving them rides to San Miguel and talking with them, attending fiestas and religious occasions and doing small favors, among other gestures—life there often remains as incomprehensible as a Chinese …
El Rancho Santa Clara 