As I trudged through fresh mud this morning to photograph the nearby dry creek, which is finally gurgling and gushing downhill, I ran into another gift left by the heavy rains we've had during the past three days: hundreds, make that thousands, of wildflowers.Flowers popping up in the spring shouldn't be a revelation anywhere, except …
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Adventures of the Three Nature Boys
Last night we had another face-to-face with nature, when Stew found a snake, about three feet long and an inch wide, placidly wrapped around itself on the kitchen floor next to the stove.Judging from a split-second glance, after which I took one picture and ran away, it seemed to be a beautiful specimen. I don't …
Waking up to an inch of rain
What with droughts and heat waves in the Midwest, floods in Texas, droughts and forest fires in Colorado and other weird climatic contortions, my hopes for a somewhat normal rainy season had risen steadily during the past three weeks.Rain in this area is a one-shot, three-month-long event, beginning in July and ending in September. We've …
Star-Spangled Beauty
The Fourth of July Festivities in San Miguel last week, sponsored by the Democrats Abroad group, was well attended, about 250 people I'd estimate, and predictable. Most all the attendees were retired geezers and the event was only loosely organized, pretty much like Democratic Party itself. For about US$15, there was a choice of hamburgers or …
Motorcycle diary
Back in March when I wrote about getting a motorcycle, Phil commented about the exhilaration of riding a bike, the freedom you feel, the wind whistling through your helmet and other Easy Rider-type folklore I suspected could be a bunch of hoo-hah.Now that I have been riding the bike for awhile, I'm starting to agree …
Parting shot
What to do about such pesky car problems as a defunct fuel pump or a leaky gas tank?In Havana, during our last few hours in Cuba, I spotted this clever solution, which is fairly common on the island according to our driver. You just take a plastic jug, fill it with gasoline, set up a …
Home for the last time
The heat, exhausting, and magnified by constant rain and the lack of even a wisp of a breeze, made our third and last day in Santa Clara a long one. Sweat stuck to our skins, and in turn, our clothes to the sweat.For me it'd been an emotional visit and for Stew a revealing one. He'd …
Wartime diary
The small brown notebook, a diary I kept for only four months beginning in November 1958, has been with me for fifty-three years, faithfully traveling along with some family pictures and a gym tee-shirt from grammar school. I wrote it when I had just turned eleven years old, but had never looked at it again. …
Going home to my memories
'Going home' is one of the most durable dramatic themes, going back to the Prodigal Son, and from there weaving its way through countless poems, stories, songs, TV shows and movies. Toni Morrison's latest novel, "Home," deals with an African-American veteran returning to Lotus, Georgia, the segregated hamlet where he grew up and which he …
Revolutionary mechanics
If you think fixing car a is tricky racket, imagine it if you didn't have access to spare parts, manuals or even the proper tools. That's exactly the predicament car owners in Cuba face when their old '57 Oldsmobiles or '49 Plymouths cough, shudder and then glide to a stop with a sorrowful sigh.Due to--in …
El Rancho Santa Clara 