They're not like Vermont's, but our own autumnal spectacle. Be sure to get up early and pay close attention. This time of the year we're showered with rapturous accounts of autumnal displays somewhere up North, when families drive around chasing the colorful fall leaves, a brief yearly event that is really a prelude to months …
One leaves for Texas, another witnesses a knifing and the third has a near fatal motorcycle accident One night a year ago, Félix, our gardener of twelve years, left without notice with his two brothers to work at high-paying construction jobs in Texas. Stew didn't take it well and cussed Félix for his disloyalty for …
Continue reading The hard and tangled lives of our ranch hands
Enough pandemic stupor. Time to move your butt and go somewhere Lately, Eric Burdon and The Animals' 1985 hit "We Gotta Get Out of this Place" has been echoing in my head. Download and play the video and you might feel the same. It's not that we want to pack up and abandon our very …
If you don't have any good ideas to deal with the U.S.'s immigration problem, just put on a show Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hypocritical move to recruit undocumented immigrants in Texas and then dump them in Martha's Vineyard in Massachussets, follows the example of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s also been also shipping busloads …
Charrerías are not just a Mexican version of rodeo. They are the national sport and a unique spectacle Rising a few miles outside Querétaro, within sight of one of the city's myriad residential subdivisions, creeping over the side of a hill like a white fungus, is Lienzo Charro Rancho Pitayo's enormous palapa and one of …
A visit to a friend in Mexico City led us to discover its collection of Art Deco treasures Last week Stew and I visited a friend in Mexico City who's just starting the renovation of a 1929 Art Deco building, in the Roma Sur neighborhood, a project that's both exciting and intimidating. Restoration or renovation …
Putting an old dog to sleep is one of life's most wrenching experiences A favorite topic of internet clickbaits are tear-jerker stories of animals—blind, lame, abandoned or in some other dire predicament—that are rescued into a forever home and live happily ever after. Our dog Domino, approximately 14 years old, didn't quite follow that script, …
Rampant water hyacinths are choking the Presa Allende If you were charged to engineer the perfect invasive plant, you could hardly do better than the water hyacinth (lirio acuático, in Spanish), which has been nicknamed by some as "the weed from hell" or "the terror of Bengal," and is now spreading explosively throughout the large …
Amid the daily avalanche of media reports about the Covid pandemic—some based on science, others on speculation and still others, perhaps the majority, on Internet conspiracies and high-octane bullshit—occasionally you run across a new angle to this topic. Such was the case with a July 22 piece in the The Atlantic magazine, that designated an …
We spent the Fourth at a lovely picnic hosted by our friends Bill and Edith, and with a few other people some of whom we hadn't seen in years because they live in a small community of expats in a quadrant of the San Miguel countryside we'd never visited. Though the menu contained the usual …
El Rancho Santa Clara 