Last Tuesday I attended a funeral mass at the church in Sosnavar, a hardscrabble village two kilometers from us, for Eduardo Arzola Chávez, age 30, whom I'd never met but somehow felt some connection to. He'd been shot to death a couple of days before.The small church was packed. Seemingly everyone in town had shown …
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Episode No. Three: About stray kittens, kind neighbors, and how good karma really works
About ten days ago Stew and I took off for Chicago, our home for thirty years, in equal parts to visit old friends and also to get away from the stress caused us by the ongoing legal brawl over a developer trying to steal some land from us.In flagrante delicto: Workers puttingup a stone wall to …
Lawlessness and disorder in Mexico: A real-life soap opera with several nasty episodes, Part 2
It all began ten years ago, when the surveyor marked the boundaries of our newly purchased land so the fence guy could get to work. The young surveyor—the son-in-law of the old rancher who sold us the land—advised us to leave a setback fifteen meters wide in front, in case the state wanted to widen …
Lawlessness and disorder in Mexico: A real-life soap opera with several nasty episodes
We bought the three hectares of land for our ranch, about ten miles outside San Miguel, from an old character we initially regarded as an unvarnished local rancher, with a folksily reticent, soft-spoken manner who during the real estate closing, a little more than ten years ago, signed his name with the laboriousness of someone …
With a little help from our friends
What would you think if I sang out of tune? / Would you stand up and walk out me?/ Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song/ And I'll try not to sing out of key. Oh I get by with a little help from friends... You will often hear that second only to its …
Fleeting moments of grace
"Grace" is a concept usually associated with theology, as in how God's grace saves sinful humans from eternal damnation. I look at it from a more earthly and ephemeral perspective: Unexpected, wonder-full moments of beauty open to us if we only take the time to pause, look and savor them. Maybe both ideas of grace …
Marijuana for dogs
Our dog Ellie is a peculiar creature that looks as if her myriad genes were cultured in a blender. She has a broad, somewhat flat face that suggests there might have some pitbull blood in the mix but she is quite small, about twenty tightly packed pounds, and doesn't show much interest or aptitude for …
A cure for current events anxiety: Bake!
Feeling as if we're drowning in a wave of depressing news from the U.S., for the past few months Stew and I have drastically trimmed our daily consumption of current events.According to some reports, symptoms of current-events overload—insomnia, anger and anxiety, among others—are widespread and affecting partisans on both sides of the political crevasse that …
Is it tequila-brewing time? Nah.
Quiotes are us: The huge stalks of thetequila agaves appear suddenly, andjust as quickly shrivel up and vanish. Succulents do weird things, particularly when they decide to flower and set fruit, and none is weirder—or more impressive—than the display of the tequila agave or Agave tequilana, if you want to get botanical about it. It starts …
A conflicted Fourth of July in Mexico
On this Fourth of July morning I went to our flagpole and raised the Mexican flag first and the Stars and Stripes right below it.This quiet ceremony was my way of celebrating America's Independence Day. I also tried taking a picture of the two flags, side by side, so to speak, but neither they nor …
El Rancho Santa Clara 