San Pancho Vida

One Tuesday Morning in the Plaza del Sol

Last week I promised a preview to a very special event happening here in March. Well...we're not quite ready for the unveiling yet, so I'll tell you next week instead, and it's worth the wait.

However, something else happened on Tuesday that we residents of San Pancho think is pretty terrific. At 9:00 in the morning in our beautiful refurbished plaza, our new weekly market, Mercado del Sol, began selling its wares. 

In the shade of the brick arcade, shoppers wandered from table to tantalizing table.

Brita's organic vegetables were a big draw. I brought home a bag full of crisp clean mixed lettuces -- red leaf, green leaf, and romaine -- and two shiny little eggplants to sauté. There were fennel bulbs, fresh herbs, kale and collards, okra and other fine veggies. At another table across the tile aisle, I bought plump ginger root, bright squash blossoms and a bag of assorted baby squash -- tiny zucchinis and yellow squash and those ones shaped like flying saucers.

Here's Franny stocking up for the next few days.

Want bee pollen? Spirulina? Teas and spices of every variety? How about chile oil and flavored vinegars? You can find them all at Mercado del Sol.

When your shopping bag is brimming with enough vegetables and other things to keep you healthy, you can find a little something for your sweet tooth, too.

Yum.

It is so delightful to know one can wake up on a Tuesday morning and shop with local friends from local friends. I found Eva with her usual smile, cooking up tacos.

I liked the way this woman found a creative way to display her jewelry.

I'll talk with more of the vendors on future Tuesdays and tell you their stories and what they have to offer.

This week, what with all that's going on in our busy pueblito, I only had time to talk at any length with one woman by the name of Rebecca Roth. Rebecca sells dolls made by women in prison.

Before I even knew her story, I was captivated by the dolls, each one hand made, each one a unique individual. The women who craft them are in the Reclusorio Feminil of the Puente Grande prison near Guadalajara. Rebecca got to know these women, and created the doll project, while she herself spent over four years there, accused of a crime of which she was finally exonerated. Now she travels throughout Mexico selling dolls made by current and released inmates. She continues to make dolls herself, too, having made the very first one for the baby girl of a fellow prisoner during her time at Puente Grande.

For more about Rebecca's story, visit her website Original Friends Dolls: The Prison Project. The dolls are also available for purchase through the website, and can be shipped to the USA.

And of course, if you're in our neighborhood on a Tuesday morning, stop by and see the dolls in person, and have a leisurely saunter through the Mercado del Sol.

It's full of surprises.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds

We have a recurring event on the beach at San Pancho that never fails to amaze.

It has a soft beginning, with the fishermen trudging up the beach from the calmer part of the bay where they launch and land their pangas, carrying heavy two-man coolers full of the day's catch. They lug their loads into town, to one of the restaurants or to the fish market. Shortly afterwards, a lone man will return to the beach toting a big white bucket on his shoulder where he unceremoniously dumps the contents, the guts and remains of now-cleaned filets, onto the sand.

How do they know?

Sure, one or two of the giant frigate birds will have been circling high above, as they do. A hundred gulls will be out there calmly riding the top of a wave, calling to each other as they do.

But suddenly the gulls are all in flight, and from some invisible somewhere the huge frigates multiply and swoop in like a pterodactl attack force, and the show begins.

The air fills with beating wings and the screeching of the gulls as the birds dive for their daily treat.

And then as suddenly as it starts, it is over. The frigates and gulls disappear, and the sky and sea are patrolled again by the silly stately pelicans who seem to prefer their fish fresh and still wiggling.

Next week I will have a special preview report on a spectacular event to occur here in San Pancho next month. Be sure to stop by for the first of likely several posts. You, too, are in for a treat :-)

Digging to China

I've been spending a lot of time on the beach lately.

My sister Denise and our friend Becky are here for a nice long (but not long enough) visit, and their favorite thing to do when they're in San Pancho on well-earned vacations is to sit at La Playa restaurant and play Mexican Train. On Tuesday, we took a walk before the Mexican Train marathon.

On Wednesday, just for a change, we went to the beach in Sayulita. Today, we went to the beach in Chacala.

We sat under a palapa roof with our feet in the powdery soft sand of Chacala bay, watching the pelicans dive and humpback whales breech over and over on the horizon. We had books but barely opened them, as there was much to see and eat and the firm wave-washed sand to walk upon.

Becky and I shared two small whole fresh huachinango (red snapper) cooked zarandeado style over mesquite coals and served with salsas and fire-charred tortillas with beans. After lunch, we all walked toward the north end of the beach. Then we loafed at the table for a while.

One of the advantages to having visitors in town, no matter where you live, is that you get to play tourist while they're visiting and you do things you hardly ever do in everyday life. In Seattle, you go up the Space Needle or wander through the Sculpture Park or visit the San Juan Islands or the Tulip Festival. In Iceland, I imagine you take your friends on tours of hotels built of ice. In Mexico City, you go to Frida Kahlo's house. In San Pancho, you spend all day at beaches.

And you watch others spending all day at beaches.

After loafing after lunch, Carol and I took a walk to the south end of the beautiful horseshoe beach. We noticed some construction activity ahead.

I got up closer to see what was going on.

Some very busy boys were hard at work in the midday sun.

Next time anyone asks me what I've been up to for the last ten days, I'm just going to tell them, "I've been digging to China."

Enjoy your week, and I wish you love on this Full Moon Valentine's Day!

💘

The Sublime Ineffability of Life in General

Me and my shadow had birthdays recently.

Birthdays often get me pondering odd things such as Douglas Adams quotes. I was looking for the exact wording of one of my favorites when I came across and re-remembered this one, from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

Me and my shadow, which turned four years old last month, have been working on that some; more and more, perhaps, as we've gotten to know each other better. My shadow, which goes by the name of San Pancho Vida, has helped me particularly with that last part about grappling with the ineffable, which word means (in case your Latin is rusty) "incapable  of  being expressed  or described in words;  inexpressible".  As in ineffable joy, for example.

My shadow follows me nearly everywhere, although I do leave it home in its box occasionally. I realized on my trip to Italy last summer that it is a true companion now, a way for me to attempt to express the inexpressible, to describe in words and in photos the marvels of everyday life in its millions of interpretations on this planet.

I thank you for giving my shadow substance and an audience, for letting the little girl who silently and constantly narrated her own life speak aloud. ("She walks up the stairs in her long flannel nightgown to her trundle bed in the hayloft carrying a flickering candle" is one line I still recall--I was nine and reading Heidi at the time, and I was in fact wearing a long flannel nightgown and carrying a candle, although we lived in an Indiana tract house suburb. My parents must have been in hysterics, but they hid it well.)

I won't tell you how old I turned on my birthday a couple of days ago, although you can get an excellent hint here. Be sure to turn up the volume.

Nowadays, I'm concentrating on the first part of that quote. Which is really why I was looking for the other Douglas Adams quote I transcribe for you below. It struck me as an apt one for the practice of thinking the unthinkable and doing the undoable. I have to say, at this age that seemed unimaginably old in 1967, I have less and less doubt that nothing is unthinkable and everything is doable, that this life offers us a series of miracles if we only get out of the way.

Today, as I continue celebrating my birthday week, I am loving and being loved by people far and near, filled with the delight of a visiting sister and another dear friend, overflowing with the ineffable joy of life, and eager to further explore its limitless possibilities. In that spirit, I leave you with these words from Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

“The Guide says there is an art to flying...or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”