April and May don't bring showers or flowers around here but mostly winds and dust, frequently spiced with brush fires, all of it to remind us of our a semiarid climate and terrain.It's a season of both high expectations and frustrations, much like February and March in the upper latitudes of the United States: You …
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.
Living the (Good) Green Life
When about three years ago we moved into a "green" house we had built—and which as far as we know remains the "greenest" house in San Miguel de Allende and the surrounding area—the initial weeks were not reassuring.A freak winter storm in January dumped several inches of rain over a two-week period and one morning …
What's With the Bees?
After a bumper crop of honey in October, really far more honey than we could process, eat or give away, a check of our hive by Stew and (Bee) Bob Lewis last week showed production had dropped drastically. This after a bountiful, if short, spring when the landscape was filled with yellow jarrilla and huizache …
The Secret Life of Dolls
Tucked behind all the racks of tourist postcards, cities hold a few secrets and surprises unknown or ignored by most visitors. Of the hundreds of thousands who pile into Chicago's Wrigley Field yearly very few will notice Alta Vista Terrace, a one-block-long jewel of a neighborhood with forty quirky houses built in the early 1900s …
Failure on the ground, triumph above
So our veterinarian says he needs a urine sample from our seventy-pound, six-year-old dog Lucy to properly diagnose her sudden, occasional incontinence. Yeah, sure, Stew said, without considering the logistics: How do you collect pee from a large dog used to roaming a seven-acre-plus ranch?After considering a small sauce pan and other options, Stew settled …
Sidelined during Holy Week
Except perhaps for the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Roman Catholic Church's grip on Mexico and particularly San Miguel de Allende, is never firmer than during Holy Week.It actually begins a week before Palm Sunday, when hundreds of chanting pilgrims come to San Miguel carrying a statue of a flagellated Jesus—ghoulishly bloody …
Blustery blast belts bees, blooms
About a month ago I gloated about the early onset of spring at the ranch and extended some watery sympathies to the folks still huddled in their igloos up north, including my hometown of Chicago.God has smitten me for my callousness and hubris: It feels as if She's turned the clock back two months, to …
Is that change we smell in San Miguel?
At noon last Sunday, with balmy temperatures and clear skies, about seventy-five San Miguel residents gathered in the main square to protest the increasing level of crime in the city, most recently highlighted by the murder of a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican woman whose body, wrapped in a tarp secured with duct tape, was dumped by the …
The happiness of the moment
When I was growing up in Cuba and later in the United States, attention deficit disorder was no front-page news. I don't think many people had even heard of it and those who had probably weren't paying much attention to the phenomenon anyway.Still, I suspect that I had a touch, or maybe a big dollop, …
To an unknown gay neighbor
A year ago, while looking for a huesera at one of the villages near our ranch, I ran into a bit of graffiti, I suspect left by a teenager, that was brief and moving: "Soy puto y qué"It's not exactly poetry and translates as, "I'm a fag, so what?" I took a picture of it that has …
El Rancho Santa Clara 