"Winter" has arrived. We have been told ever since we got here that it can be cold in November, December and January, and in fact is cold more often than not in these months. Jim and I have lived in warm climates long enough so that we have to agree that when they say cold, they mean cold. You folks in Missouri and Massachusetts and Connecticut may not think it is, but we were driven to light a fire in our living room stove. The stove is some fancy thing from Sweden and it works terrifically well. We took time off from our snug living room last night to go have pizza at Halágos in Coátepec. Halágos is not heated, but it has one of those giant torches -- like a huge gas burner -- to take the edge off. I think I will resist sending you photos of Halágos. Some of these places you should just be surprised by when you come. Halágos is owned by a couple from Mexico City. Lots of people in our area our refugees from Mexico City as I think I've mentioned before. The restaurant is a wonderful example of the less is more philosophy. On the side of a large courtyard, it is elegant with the original walls and rails and floors. Lighting is minimal and romantic. And the food is delicious and made mostly of local stuff.
Which leads me to reporting that last night I mentioned to my son that we never had so many people dropping in on us in our lives Before Mexico. I don't know quite what he thinks about our lives here, but I suspect he is worried about them. He commented that people must be bored if they're dropping in on each other all the time. He of course is non-stop busy as is Gillian. As are other people who say things like, when do you get the time to read? Partly, it's because Jim is retired and I only am doing indexing part-time. But partly it's because people here spend time with each other as a matter of choice.
I think our lives should offer hope to those of you who feel overwhelmed: this is what life is like when you don't contribute so much to global warming. No guilt for reading, talking, enjoying each other's company. No giant flat-screened TVs, no dishwashers, etc. No room for giant cars. Lots of stuff is in the neighborhood so we don't hop in the car to go shopping that often. We buy probably ninety percent of our food locally and fresh and we can't feel self-righteous about it because it's easier and tastier than going to the supermarket. We park and walk in town because just like it wasn't fun in NYC when I was a kid, trying to drive in Coátepec and Xalapa is not fun...but it IS fun to walk down busy streets and peek in shop windows and stop to chat to people and smell the food cooking in restaurants and know the lady selling me chicken and so on -- much more fun than parking in a giant asphalt parking lot and making your way through a box store or a mall (I do confess to loving to go to Costco here).
Of course we do live a charmed life. Life IS harder for most Mexicans than for most Americans. As I mentioned before, a lot of men in our neighborhood work at the local Coca Cola plant, the local Gamesa plant (Mexican equivalent of Nabisco), the giant Nestle plant six days a week, ten hours a day for $1.05 an hour. These are good jobs. Many others work six days a week -- 800 am to 600 pm -- in construction, or work part time as maids and gardeners or try to make some change selling groceries, etc (abarrotes) out of their houses. Some are coffee farmers. We have a neighborhood processing plant for coffee. With these jobs, people have to think twice before deciding spend the money to take the bus five miles into Coátepec.
People don't have access to good dentistry, for instance. When a tooth goes bad, it's yanked out. Period. So you will notice that Guillermo won't smile in a photo even though, missing teeth and all, he has a gorgeous smile. Medical care is a problem, though people here do get some kind of reasonable care even if they don't have the state insurance. (I have to find out more about that. I do know for people with even a low US sized income, good medical care is cheap without insurance at all. ) I suspect here in our Colonia, though, just as a tooth is yanked rather than treated, so the medical treatment does what is most expedient. And, in cold weather, they don't have fancy wood stoves (a whole other issue: our stove burns wood efficiently. Deforestation is a big problem)But living here what I think I have been learning is just how far afield we've gone in the US, thinking we need to be caught up in that giant engine of endless activity. Here you see right in front of your face the consequences of the global economy's emphasis on making, selling and buying stuff as the way to keep itself going around. You see it not only in the pain of extremely low wages and long hours, the rise in diabetes with the rise in consumption of processed sugar, the towns without men, but also in the hillsides scraped for large-scale industrialized agriculture, a growing use of feedlots, erosion of huge quantities of the rich soil of our region, smoky air from burning hundreds of acres of sugar cane.
And you see the consequences in the growing piles of garbage. Especially the rich and the foreigners complain about litter in Mexico. First, I have to say that in their personal and community space, Mexicans put Americans to shame. Then I have to say that the litter that exists is the litter from soda bottles and junk food wrappers and other over-packaging. This occurs I believe because there's no easy way to keep it out of sight. In the US, we hide our litter from ourselves, all the while adding to the garbage stream. We may recycle some stuff (this is expensive, too, and not the best way to deal with excess consumption). But we depend on garbage services to put it somewhere else. And that's what is done: it's put somewhere else. Squashed, maybe, so it doesn't take up so much room, but heaped. Here it is expensive to have your garbage picked up if you don't have much money. So people recycle and reuse a huge amount, but there is always some left over. And it is the stuff that results from the global economy depending on people to buy stuff they don't need and that often isn't good for them and that is wrapped in gobs and gobs of plastic and paper and foil that provides the visible litter in Mexico.
I don't think humans CAN be completely happy and satisfied as mortals, at least not yet. We haven't evolved to that point, and maybe it's good that we keep tossing and turning with questions and regrets and doubts and yearnings. It keeps at least some folks adventurous and curious. It keeps us compassionate. Because of the way we are, I don't think we even can know what a perfect society would look like let alone how to get to it.
but I do know that efforts to "green" the US while encouraging it to continue to consume ever more stuff are doomed to bring disaster on us all.
Anyway, I have to go -- I want to see the kids passing by. They're practicing for the parade on Monday. After that, there's the Fiesta of La Virgén de Guadalupe, then Posadas and Christmas.....