From Xico

A Fine Christmas Was Had by All

In her December 26 column, Maureen Dowd finished with a quote from Henry van Dyke:

“Are you willing ... to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness ... to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings ...? Then you can keep Christmas.”

Oh how easy it is to agree with this, and how very hard to live it. But this Christmas, I think our family lived it, lightly, and well. One of the weird things about writing this blog is how devoid of detail about people it is: I cannot write intimate stuff about people I know because to do so on a blog would be a betrayal, an invasion of privacy. But it is really the people who give our lives its substance. And it was family who did this Christmas. So a bit about our family Christmas with, I hope, nothing personal enough to give offense.

I look forward to Christmas, generally, with more trepidation than pleasure, our families' Christmases, for me, having often been
intensely mixed with our families' struggles. And with the children grown, we have been so scattered not just across the country, but across several countries. Bringing at least some of us together is a mighty effort, sometimes more exhausting than it has been worth, the departures at the end reminding me of the long days of absence to come.

But this year, as if by some unspoken, barely conscious if at all agreement, as if by some magical alignment of our souls, Christmas worked. Ex-spouses and second spouses, a long-lost relative, stressed parents, active kids, frayed in-laws, and calm practically-family friend gathered with affection and great good humor and cooked and drank and opened presents and played.

One of the matriarchs present is an excellent cook. Christmas Eve she and her long-lost relative and helpmate presented us with roast leg of lamb and potatoes and veggies. She happens also to be Ethiopian, so for Christmas Day, she prepared an Ethiopian feast. Below is a picture of that.

A Christmas Blog about Poinsettias

Poinsettias, those plants with winter leaves of scarlet hue, cheap, ubiquitous at Christmas time, straggly before spring, are by ancestry Mexican, though a few hang out in Guatemala, too. Their leaves turned vivid (and of course it is not the flowers, but the leaves that are red) through thousands of Decembers when the Indigenas were expanding empires and destroying them, when they were carving giant Olmec heads and building waterways and pyramids, when shamans turned to leopards and gardens floated in the lakes of the Valley of Mexico. They flourished here long before the Spanish ever dreamed there might be a route to India. Or knew there was an India.
We first saw them growing in Uruapan in Michoacan, about a thousand feet lower than where we now live. They were on TREES, for heaven’s sake, and we really weren’t convinced they were actually poinsettias and not some extravagant look-alike. They grew everywhere, in yards and parks and, it seemed, coming out of cracks in concrete. They were like ailanthus trees in Brooklyn. They are most common, and I suspect healthiest, on the lower slopes of the west side of Mexico.
Here is a picture of one we took on our eastern side, up at about five thousand feet. As you can see, it is struggling a bit in this wetter, colder place.

Here is what they are called in Nahuatl: cuetlaxochitl, which means something like plant with leathery leaves.
There are legends. How could there not be, for such a startling plant?

One of the legends, from Taxco, says some of the people living there didn’t want to pay tribute to Moctezuma. When he heard this, Moctezuma took a great army to put an end to the rebellion, leaving a huge number of dead in his wake. In the spreading pools of blood from the dead, beautiful scarlet flowers grew up, commemorating them. Sometime later, Moctezuma decided to take a bit of a vacation in Taxco which was said to have lovely weather. He found the cuetlaxochitl growing wild in the forests and brought some of them to his botanical gardens at Huaxtepec where he dedicated himself to their cultivation.

Others say that the cuetlaxochitl symbolizes the blood of those sacrificed to the sun to renew its strength, or to commemorate warriors killed in battle.

Here’s another legend:

When God (which one I don’t know) created nature on Mother Earth, he asked the plants to choose their best flowers for the new-born world. He also asked that they choose the flowers that possessed the most important virtues: beauty, love, harmony and wisdom.
One day, God saw that one plant especially, from the moment of its birth, wanted badly to be chosen. It worked hard to show its most sacred essence. But no matter how much it struggled to be chosen, no one stopped to admire it. No one appreciated it since its flower was very tiny and its leaves very large. This saddened the plant, but it struggled on to be chosen even though no one seemed to love it.
Upon noticing all its effort, God went to the plant and said to it: I see that you are very beautiful and that you give much love even though your beauty isn’t valued. For this I am going to share my blood with you. He painted the plants leaves with his blood, and thus they were transformed into the most beautiful scarlet leaves ever seen. So it became a most beautiful flower which burst into color at the time of year which celebrated the birth of that being who represented the love and divine essence of the universe and took on the name Flor de Nochebuena, Flower of Christmas Eve, the truly Good Night.
In this way, the Flor de Nochebuena is welcomed every year bringing beauty, love, hope wisdom and harmony to all the people on earth.

******

Perhaps this last legend arose at the time when the Spanish were whipping Catholicism into the mix of Mexican religions, in the 16th century. That’s a subject for another post, as is naming the Flor de Nochebuena "poinsettia" after Joel Roberts Poinsett, rambunctious American minister to Mexico in the 1820’s.

In the meantime, y’all have a Very Merry Christmas! We are headed to the Bay Area to see a good number of our kids and grandkids.

a dog and a bridge

Updates:
The bridge is finished! It is two-way, very modern, and has bright red guard rails which keep it from looking blah-functional. It was a one-lane bridge for so many, many years that people still pause before crossing to wait for the traffic coming from the other direction to clear. We will post a picture shortly. We meant to take pictures as it was being built, but never did. Many hands went into its construction -- this is a labor-intensive part of the world. And it should probably stay that way.

Our newest dog, Giaco, is quite a fine fellow. His hair is growing, for which he is grateful as nights at this time of year are very chilly indeed. We had a bit of a conflict of opinion going with two people here being convinced he was a Saluki, two convinced he was an Afgan. Jim and I don't really care, but I sent his pictures to the Saluki rescue organization in the States where there are apparently experts at distinguishing between them (wouldn't want to rescue an Afghan by mistake) to calm the heightened emotions of the disputants. I received word back that he was either an Afghan or an Afghan mix. No Saluki. However, I might point out, these folks have never seen the dog in person. Anyway, Jim and I had started referring to him as an Afghaluki. I like the ring of it. We'll see how long his hair gets before coming to a definitive decision, though of course there are some short-haired Afghans!

Here are illustrations of skeletons of a Saluki and of an Afghan. Can you tell the difference?

Giacometti Ourdog Not Our Foster Dog and Another Day Trip

Every time we do something like this we start worrying that our kids are wondering if we are becoming ummm senile or something. But we have decided to keep Giaco, so we now have four dogs. Giaco was a very sad creature when we brought him inside our gate. He was practically bald, could barely stand, smelled terrible. But as he gained strength, he gained personality and our hearts. There is some debate among people we know about whether he is a Saluki or an Afghan. We are getting pretty convinced that he is a Saluki, a close relative of the Afghan and, for that matter, the greyhound. These Salukis are a pretty interesting breed, possibly the oldest breed going at around 5000 years. They are sight hounds and online it is suggested they not be let off the leash as they may run and chase anything and not be retrievable. However, Giaco had been wandering our neighborhood for some time getting thinner and thinner of course and had never been seen chasing anything. He responds with a snap when neighborhood dogs growl and come close but he has not broken skin. He doesn't yank us to chase things when he's on the leash, and there's a lot to chase around here, especially chickens. One of our neighbors doesn't speak to the other in part because the other's dog caught one of her chickens!

So we have started taking Giaco with us on our trips, and this trip we let him off the leash. Jim takes GPS readings at churches in pueblitos and road crossings and so forth and so we are building up quite a useful Google Earth map with names of towns we previously couldn't find on any map. Friday we closed another loop, driving through Teocelo, past some previous stops, and ended up coming home through Xico. All these routes -- many of them are ancient: Who passed on them? What languages did they speak?What did they talk about? Where were they going? What did they believe in? If I weren't worried what the kids would think I would confess to catching sight of whisps and shreds of the long-ago drifting past me.

So here are some shots from this last trip. All the stream pictures are by Jim.

Here is Giaco in the back of the RAV4.

One of the towns we stopped at was Alameda. Here Happy spies a sheep

And Jim spies a burro

The church's interior. Jim took this picture. Actually, I think this is the interior from the church in the previous town, but it's prettier than the one in this town.

The road out of town. You can see bits of pine forest sticking up above the rooves. There is evidence of reforestation in this area, and it needs it. Lovely and lush as the pastures look around here, everywhere you can also see fallen-away places, black scars really, and you know the heavy rich soil is sliding towards the rivers and streams to be carried away.

We pulled off the road next to a stream. We went through the gate into the steep pasture where cows grazed on ledges. My ex-husband would have called them side-hill gougers. It was an idyllic spot. It couldn't have been better. We let Giaco off the leash. He came to life, sailing like a gazelle, as if he were made of air and wind. He didn't run off, but always looked behind to make sure his new family was nearby.

He also seemed rather vain and posed carefully for pictures.

Cosi under some giant fern trees.

The beautiful stream.

And to make sure we have all the dogs represented, here is Rita in the beautiful stream.

We go to parties sometimes

My friends Susan and Kris had a joint birthday/halloween party. It was a half-hearted costume party, but a full-hearted good time with a great band made up of Susan's boyfriend among a group of friends and family. Some of the band members play professionally, some don't, but they only play as a band for fun. So here are some pictures.

This is Kris in her Hare Krishna fashion statement
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This is Susan as spider woman maybe with friend LuAnn

Here is Jim dressed as a Joseph Albers painting

This is Robert arriving creepily

Susan's sister from Virginia and friend

Angel or witch?

The band

Water and Bats

Yesterday was a great day in our Colonia. Three years ago, the people here undertook to get fresh potable water directly to the community. Yesterday, the water poured forth. The Colonia president opened the valve in a clearing high up behind the Capilla Azul (which, by the way is now roja -- rosa, más o menos, painted anew for the upcoming Fiesta de la Virgén de Guadalupe). There were speeches and of course a ribbon-cutting. People were amazed at what they had accomplished, and proud. And things that previously I had thought of as clichés no longer seemed that way: "water is life," for instance, and "we can do great things when we work together as a community." Before we can use the water, a holding tank has to be built, but after the first two stages, that seems a piece of cake.

The first stage of the water project was completed shortly after we got here. I think I wrote about the convivio celebrating the construction at the spring site itself. A convivio is loosely translated as potluck, but it's more than that: it's a celebratory coming together. The second phase involved constructing a pipe that winds its way up and down hills and around curves and along roads and across rivers for if I remember close to fifteen miles. Everyone was charged a series of faenas, or portions of the work. You either had to pay money or provide labor. Since our community is not rich, many, many people provided labor. Either the city or the state provides a copayment, but that copayment is absolutely contingent on the contribution of the community. We were very, very happy we had taken part.

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I have been wanting for awhile to write a bit about a trip we took to see bats -- murcielagos in Spanish, really a lovely word, I think. I started to look out for really lovely words when I was a child, when we saw some version of Cinderella where Estelle Winwood played the fairy godmother. Somehow she found it fit to say that one of her favorite words was elbow. Murciélagos is a word like that for me. Much prettier than bat. Bats I never liked, but now murciélagos: a whole new ball game.

We are fairly mediocre birders, Jim and I, I more than Jim. A big part of the reason is that the trips generally start at six in the morning which means we have to leave our house at five thirty, something I am not highly motivated to do. But the murcielago expedition was in the evening. All of us mediocre birders turned out for it even though it wasn't primarily to see birds because, slothful as we are, we could stay in bed all day if we wanted and still make it on time. It may have, in fact, been a record turnout, with forty of us showing up to drive down towards the coast, to a farmer's field, to a fairly ordinary looking hole in the ground.

But nothing here for me is very ordinary. Certainly not the sky we walked under from the car to the bat hole.

Here are some of us waiting for sunset when the bats would appear:

As on all our outings, children are welcome. These girls brought what must now span the world: Barbie dolls. Here they were preparing a Barbie for the bats -- I think. Or maybe it was a Barbie funeral. Who knows?

The bats live in a cave under an innocuous, almost overgrown hole in a completely undistinguished place. THis photo of it looks strange because I have sharpened it to try to make the hole clearer. The effort was fairly unsuccessful, but I liked the effects of the sharpening process.

As dusk spreads across the countryside, hawks silently appear, one sitting on a wire, another on a branch...a lone bat slips out of the cave and disappears in a flash, then another, then another as the hawks fly off. Then it is safe for the rest. More bats flow out, and more and more. Their wings make a whirring sound, though it seems almost silent. There are hundreds, then thousands.

For some more pictures of this, you should follow this link to the COAX site where there are better pictures of the bats and a picture of the structure of a bat and if I remember a couple of pictures of all of us. It's a nice site, by the way, with all the trips documented, etc.

Below are a couple of photos I took of the bats coming out.