Yesterday the ants came marching on. Thousands and thousands streaming from somewhere around the back of the woodpile, across the driveway, around the bodega, some drifting towards our back door and disappearing in the flower beds. I sprinkled generous doses of cinammon across the threshold of the backdoor, but they weren't particularly interested in coming in: other creatures were, caterpillars especially, to escape. Jim took a photo of an ant attacking the leg of a slender, long-legged creature. Jero came and we asked her what to do. "Leave them," she said. "They'll go away soon." And they did, as if they had never been there. Later that morning Anita and John, our neighbors, came home from their weekend in "el campo". They have a little house up above Xico where they get away from the crowds here in Col. Ursulo Galván. You have to realize John and Anita live in Colorado, literally miles and miles from their nearest neighbor. Anyway, their yard was swarming. The ants must have marched over to their house. Anita, who hates using pesticides, was about ready to dump clouds of them on the invading armies. We passed on Jero's advice to wait. They must have because we haven't heard any bad news about the ants since.

Jim has become captivated by insects here. It's hard not to. For everything that we humans have managed to invent, create, build, knit, sculpt, whatever, it's hard to find anything, not just insects, that competes with what is here without our input for complexity, delicacy, beauty, intricacy, funcionality, etc, etc. This is not to knock human inventiveness and creativity, just to say it is truly humbling to see what we did not do. Of course it is our human eye that appreciates these things and our art and photography that allow us to perpetuate the images and reenvision them. Anyway, Jim has put some of his insects on flickr. I take snapshots. Jim makes art. You can see some bugs as well as some other wonderful photos of his at www.flickr.com/photos/jbuddenh . Check it out. You won't regret the time spent.

This morning the clouds have departed. I woke up to a clear sky streaked with rosy shreds of cloud. Mist was coming off the waterfall. It is, for us, cold. You can see your breath.

Monday was a national holiday (again). This time, 20th of November which marks the day that Francisco Madero and his men forced the resignation of Porfirio Díaz. I think I said that before. All the towns big and small have parades of schoolchildren. For me this may have been one parade too many, not because I don't like parades, but because none of the schoolkids participating in our neighborhood parade looked particularly happy to be in it, and because it cost the parents thirty bucks a kid to put them in their parade uniforms. Granted, here thirty bucks wouldn't even buy two books, they're so expensive. But it would have bought a lot of other stuff for people on highly limited incomes. Jero makes thirty bucks for twenty hours' (más o menos) work a week. I was reminded of my public school years. Some one would get the the idea the schools had to rush into in some such activity and the parents would have to buy the requisites. I have one vivid memory (a nice one, actually, though my mother was, along with a lot of other mothers, miffed at the expense) of going to the campus at Fordham University in the Bronx where we lived to take part in a maypole dancing contest for which we had rehearsed endless hours. Each competing school's teams had a maypole with many ribbons dangling -- maybe it was all the girls in the sixth grade, something like that. A lot us. We each held a ribbon and did some steps or other to music to braid the ribbons around the pole. We each had to wear a white dotted swiss dress. I remember the parents complaining that they had to pay for these dresses (I loved mine, with its puffy skirt and puffy sleeves) which were not cheap and of course were WHITE. I remember my mother and her friends clucking: How many eleven year old girls had a lo of use for white dotted swiss dresses? How many could even keep them clean? What parent would deny his daughter? I lived in a very mixed neighborhood in those days, incomes varying from maybe upper middle class to definitely poor. The pressures were intense to make sure your daughter had her dress.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the parade in the Colonia.