Eight years ago, I drove to the Santa Cruz, CA, area to visit old friends. It had been fourteen years since I left there to move to Mexico, and when I spent the night with my friends Linda and Steve, they invited my other good friends Dan and Laurie to come for dinner. When we […]
These stories I am about to tell are true stories (or so I have been told) from San Juan Cosalá, the small Mexican pueblo where I have lived for 22 years. Those foreigners who live in the village would say, perhaps, that I am not really a part of it, and maybe that is true,
He clicked the scissors twice. On the first click, my stomach clinched, but on the second, I felt something break—like a tight rubber band. I didn’t look in the mirror to see the first lock fall to the floor, but by the second cut, I was ready to face facts. I looked to the floor
I was purified each Sunday, sitting on a child-sized wooden chair, belting out “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Sure of salvation, my only worry was whether I’d forget the Bible verse memorized by repeating it every morning and every night for the preceding week. I was gloriously holy, worrying about
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Stones in the shape of hearts lay directly in front of me on my walks along the 20 miles of lakefront between Chapala and Jocotepec. I still have some of these rocks, starting out with a perfect little white heart and ending in a progression of multicolored irregular stones that were, nonetheless, hearts. Then within
My 15-year-old cat Annie just peed in my shower—I mean a man-sized stream that arced up from where she was standing on the floor in front of the shower, over the 6-inch ledge and into the shower, where it ran from a couple of feet away right down the drain. I shouted, “No, no,” but
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We stifle our laughter and stifle our sighs. Flutter our palms to dry out our eyes. All of these feelings caught up inside, go back inside us to fester and hide. What if we simply allowed them to flow wherever emotions wanted to go? Let out our laughter whenever it wanted– in church or in
Bonus View The sun was at its zenith and although I ventured bare out to my jacuzzi, I had no intent to share a peepshow with my neighbors, for tall bushes masked the view from their high terrace to my bedroom, and my hot tub, too. I’d forgotten that leaf cutter ants had lately been
