Earlier this year, a woman said to me at a cocktail party, “So you hate the United States?” “What?” I’m sure my eyebrows leaped nearly to my hairline with surprise. I wondered whether she’d been lying in wait for me. “You call yourself an expatriate. You even admit it right here.” Her left hand raised […]
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It started in 2001 with supplying a pair of shoes so that a young man didn’t have to go to college barefoot. He’d already won a scholarship. A San Miguel woman named Helen Morris provided them, and a relationship blossomed from there. Soon she was joined by Virginia Wheelwright and several others in providing financial […]
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San Miguel de Allende has, for decades, been one of the shining jewels of Colonial Mexico, a mecca for painters, writers, musicians or anyone with artistic sensibilities who has been touched by its ancient cobblestone streets, by the way the light and shadows fall across the distant hills or by the adobe walls painted the […]
Continue ReadingThere’s a tale that has floated through my family for many years. It seems that my great-aunt Tillie was having some vision problems. We didn’t know about macular degeneration in Aunt Tillie’s day, but that’s what it was. Back then they just said, “Aunt Tillie’s blind as a bat.” “Why, she can’t even see the […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who has ever had enough stamina or time to traipse through the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City gets a mere glimpse of Mexico’s treasures. I’ve heard there are enough artifacts in storage to fill the museum twenty times over, and still have skeletons in the closet. There was a time when it […]
Continue ReadingIn matriarchal-governed communities we sometimes loose sight of the patriarchal side of the coin. We have read that physical and mental abuse runs amuck in Latin American homes. Pick up any newspaper in whatever part of the world you may be living in and you’ll find the statistics are about the same. These conditions do […]
Continue ReadingI know about sisters. I had seven. There is a brother-to-sister relationship and a brother-to-brother relationship, but it is not quite like a sister-to-sister relationship. We all know men and women who have never had a sister. Some siblings don’t really like each other; some don’t even tolerate each other, but think about the person […]
Continue ReadingMexico enjoys temperate climes throughout the year. It gets a bit warm on the coast in the summertime and a bit chilly in some of our mountains in the wintertime. But generally, we don’t suffer the debilitating hot, humid summers our northern neighbors do, nor do we skate around on frozen lakes in the wintertime. […]
Continue ReadingIn 1985, there were four Americans living in Talpa. Guy Lawlor and Bill Worth had almost finished their ranch house, or so I thought. Twenty-three years have passed and it is still almost finished. Bill never allows his measuring tape or draftsman’s pencil to lie idle for long. The great open hall upstairs, with four […]
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There was an Indian mound near my home when I was growing up. We knew we were not supposed to play near the mound, and we knew it was an ancient burial spot, but we didn’t know it might have been a “power place.” My older brothers had shoeboxes full of flint arrowheads collected from […]
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