San Pancho Vida

Here on the Frontier

I went on a reading binge some years ago when I couldn’t get enough of a particular kind of book. I don’t remember which book got me started, but like that first bite of chocolate, it hooked me. I began to read every book I could find with autobiographical accounts of women and frontiers.

Crossing the plains on their way to settle the West in the 1800’s, the American pioneer women packed their children and their household necessities into covered ox-drawn wagons, the prairie schooners.

As I read their stories, besides being boggled at the difficulties they encountered and usually overcame, the part that fascinated me most was this: what did they choose to bring along on their journey? Washtubs and washboards, dishes and pots and cookstoves, schoolbooks and slates. Paper and pens and ink. Dried fruits and vegetables. Black tea, coffee, salt.

They packed tools and nails, a rocking chair and grandma’s quilt. Sewing thread, fabric and needles. China washbasins. Candles. Recipes. Poultry. Supplies for the trip, and things they knew they needed that they were pretty darn sure they weren’t going to find at the end of the Oregon Trail.

Around the same time, British women were travelling by ship to join their husbands in colonial India and the Far East. Another alien culture. What did they pack? Silver tea services, trunks full of shoes and morning dresses and evening gowns, parasols, teakettles, lots of books. Face creams. Badminton sets and embroidery hoops. Pianos.

In the early 1900’s, Englishwoman Gertrude Bell, unmarried and frightfully independent, set off alone for the near east: Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia. Among other adventures, Gertrude crossed deserts on a regular basis on horse or camelback, accompanied by local guides and guards and a Christian cook, all male. Camping in the middle of nowhere, she would unpack her canvas bathtub and have a soak in her tent while her cook prepared an elaborate tea.

What else did she carry on the mules and camels of her caravans? Crystal glassware, toiletries, cameras, art supplies, gifts for the sheiks she would get to know. Tea and sugar and bone-china cups. A hot water bottle, two pairs of eyeglasses, cigarettes, extra high-button boots, a huge fancy hat and a large mirror.

You’d think things would’ve changed a lot by now, wouldn’t you? 

One of the many lists I have on my kitchen counter as I write this is the “Bring from the States” list. On it are: good black tea, eyeglasses, American Spirit cigarettes, lampshades, salad spinner, bathroom scale. Coleman’s mustard, Angostura Bitters and Pickapeppa sauce. Ghirardelli chocolate chips. An ovenproof griddle. Shoes for Mexico City. No poultry, no piano, although I admit to having already brought down embroidery hoops and a badminton set. Yes, my favorite vitamins, and parchment paper. Another box of Off DEET Towelettes. Finish nails. An old-fashioned non-electric telephone. Fine-point pens. And a few special tubes of acrylic paint. 

Only a few years ago, the list would have been longer. Now, with Walmart and Costco and Sam’s Club in Puerto Vallarta, many items we can’t seem to live without are available (usually...sometimes). Now and then, we can find horseradish, although that’s rare. The Mega supermarket carries fresh mozzarella and Johnsonville sausages, L’Oreal and John Frieda shampoos and a few colors of Revlon nail polish.

Sometimes Mega has Best Foods mayonnaise and for a while they had Skippy peanut butter although lately they’ve switched to Jif. Shoot.

Oh! the joy of a phone call from a friend asking, “Do you want C&H Golden Brown Sugar? I found it!” or “Shall I buy you a bag of real lemons?” both of which arrived in Mexico quite recently. But my chocolate chip oatmeal cookies were so not the same without American brown sugar, and who can resist a squeeze of fresh yellow lemon on a caprese salad or a twist in a cocktail? Not to mention lemonade that’s not limeade. 

We’ve all learned one vital maxim: if you see it and you want it, buy it. It might not be there next time.

Still, many things we know and love and use are only available north of the border. So suitcases and cars are packed full on every trip back to Mexico. (Last time, I brought down Gold Toe socks for a friend who shall remain nameless, as it is his birthday today and he might not have opened his present yet.)

Franny tells me her list for their next return trip has on it smoked paprika, sheets and bedding, Clinique moisturizer, good bath oils and fragrances, and wasabi powder. Also a meat thermometer, a pool thermometer, a coffee grinder, Dramamine, a garden hose and a kitchen faucet. 

Manny is bringing fabric, clothes from TJMaxx, walnuts, cotton sheets, garden speakers, a writing desk, and hard aged cheese.

(Which reminds me. Karen brought down a wheel of Cougar Gold cheddar last time and let us taste it at Panchito’s. She rescued some for her family in the nick of time, as it was going fast. I’m adding cheddar to my list right now.)

Over the past year, I’ve brought friends car parts, books, Kindles, cameras, adapters, smoked salmon and body lotion. Friends have brought me tea and chocolate chips and rubber door stops. 

Judith, who has lived here for twenty years, has long lists of things she buys north and carries south. She regularly brings back Baker’s unsweetened baking chocolate (which is now available here at seven dollars a bar) for her town-renowned brownies. She buys Lime-Away, Mobil One synthetic oil, almond butter and Crabtree & Evelyn soaps, cosmetics and rubber cement. Next trip, among other things, she’ll bring an oven thermometer and Benadryl gel, Jockey underpants and Victoria’s Secret bras. And Starbuck’s coffee. Or Peet’s.

Now, if you’re up there and not down here, you might be thinking, “Why don’t these people just adjust?”

Hey, I would reply, we have already adjusted a lot. Have you ever tried to pay a phone bill in Mexico?? What’s the longest you’ve ever waited for a plumber to show up?? Think of these imported items as our equivalent of the comfort food (mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, Haagen-Dazs, Dinty Moore beef stew, Franco-American spaghetti) that you have to eat when it’s freezing up there for six months. These things just make us feel better.  

It’s funny, though. As time goes by, this missing of things happens in reverse, too. Carol, who is now back in the States, was recently bemoaning reaching for something in the grocery store (Tajin chile seasoning, maybe) and not finding it there. Franny was telling me how disappointed she was last time she ordered a hotdog at a U.S. Costco and they didn’t have any jalapeños to put on it!

That said, if you’re heading this way and have a tiny vacancy in the corner of your suitcase, drop us a line, would you? Someone down here might be in desperate need of WeedEater string or pretzel M&M’s. Or underpants.

 

                                            ☂    ✎    ☏

 

                         ☆☆☆Happy Birthday, Tyrone!!☆☆☆

Everything Goes

            Wednesday, Feb. 9, 11:20 a.m. PST

            Somewhere over southern California or northern Mexico

Here I am, up in the air again.

My sister Denise sits beside me here in first class. I used my Alaska Airlines mileage to upgrade us. By the time our brother Greg decided he wanted to come along for the ride, first class was full on this non-stop flight. So he is ten rows back on the other side of the partition, but I brought him a Bloody Mary, compliments of our flight attendant. We’ve never flown together on a plane, all three of us: this is a first. It will also be my sister’s first time to San Pancho, my brother’s first time to see Casa Luz de Luna.

Besides being comparatively pampered, the best thing about upgrading to first class is that you get to check two fifty pound bags for free. I’ve tried to take full advantage of that, toting a hundred pounds plus carry-on nearly every flight I’ve taken from Seattle to Puerto Vallarta. Imagine my joy this time, realizing that my sis could check a hundred more, and my brother (for a measly $40 total) a hundred more than that.

I wish you could have seen our son’s vacant former bedroom, left un-staged at my request last week, with six big suitcases ranged about, every inch of new carpet covered with piles of stuff to pack. Unfortunately, I was too obsessive/frantic to remember to take photos of any of the process.

Some of the suitcases were old, one new, and one purchased for me by Greg for $15 at Value Village (or Valoo Villazh, as we prefer to call it). It’s a hideous pink floral, but boy, is it ever roomy! And it has zippers and wheels that work, which is important for a bag destined to carry fifty pounds.

When we all checked in at the airport, with the bags all assigned and tagged and locked with TSA locks, I was a little dismayed to discover that most of the suitcases weighed closer to forty pounds than fifty and I had wasted a potential sixty pounds of baggage, but I guess our backs will be better for the omission.

I worked that room like a dervish for two and a half days. I got everything in, too. Now, sitting here on the plane, I’m trying to remember what the heck I packed.

I know I have two whole new rolls of that puffy white perforated rubbery-plastic shelf liner from Bed Bath and Beyond. It was on the top of my “Take to Mexico--Feb” list. I brought a roll down last time, and I was impressed by how well it worked on concrete shelves. It makes them all cushiony so glass and pottery things don’t bang or clank (or break) when you put them down. Plus there’s the air circulation factor. I just had to have more.

I have a brand new really fancy Mexican Train domino set that Dick bought me for my birthday. It has 91 colorful tiles and a center thingy that makes choo-choo and chicken sounds, or so the box says. I packed it unopened. It’s very heavy, so I put it in Greg’s suitcase.

I also have a couple of other games, one rather largish, and some presents, but I can’t tell you what they are yet. Some of them are heavy, too.

I have a clock. Two clocks, actually. One is a neat little blue bedside alarm with "nightime display", but the other one is a Clock.

Last week I went into TJ Maxx, a store I should avoid, looking for a suitcase. I did not find a suitcase, but I did accidentally find two pairs of shoes and a clock. I wasn’t even shopping for a clock and had no idea I wanted one until I saw it. It’s big and kind of old-fashioned looking, with an authentic round clock face with real numbers. It was only $14.95, or maybe $12.95, I can’t remember. But it was love at first sight. I could just see it hanging in the casa. It’s packed at the top of one of Denise’s suitcases. It’s so big, it just barely fits.

The other suitcase she checked (the pink floral -- she is so not a pink floral type person that I knew she just had to carry it) is filled with feathers. And stick-on roll-y eyes and brightly colored pipe cleaners and white paper sandwich bags and all kinds of other stuff for making hand puppets, which I plan to do with the San Pancho children this spring. You wouldn’t think that stuff could possibly weigh forty pounds, would you? It probably doesn’t: I must’ve stuffed other things in there, but I don’t know what. My giant plastic bag full of feather boas couldn’t have added that much weight.

Oh, yeah, I remember: tools. I found a gorgeous hundred-piece drill bit set on sale at Lowe’s that I just had to have. And a few more flashlights I found around the house. I also filled a small wood cigar box with...something heavy. What was it? Little nails? I’m not sure. I do know I have four brand new metal and plastic clamps to hold the Yamaha cargo box on to the roof of the Rav4. Dick also bought those for me for my birthday. They were not that easy to find, either. I have visions of cruising around greater Mexico filling that box up with all kinds of roadside goodies.

When the gas furnace guy came to clean and inspect the furnace, he pulled the gas stove out from the wall to change a fitting for me as a favor, and there was my favorite wooden spoon behind the stove! It’s kind of stained from spaghetti sauce which my mom (and maybe even her mom) stirred with it for many, many meals. I was so happy to see it, I added a few more favorite utensils and such to keep it company in the suitcase.

All the sidepockets of all the suitcases I stuffed with papers and flat things at the last minute. I have well-used and dripped upon recipes that will translate well into Mexican product availability. I have files of receipts, of important information, of New York Times crossword puzzles clipped out of the Sunday paper. I have my collection of Mexican watercolors, all of streets and dwellings, that I’ll frame in Mexico and hang upon Mexican walls.

Those last few days at the Seattle house were as you’d expect: nuts. I met my deadline like a crash dummy meets a brick wall. But it’s done. Everything packed, dispersed, or disposed of. The house is on the market, waiting for its new family to claim it.

As for me, I’m going to sit here on this jet, order another Bloody Mary, and prepare for a graceful landing on the runway of my new life.

                                            ✈    ✈    ✈    ☀

Stuff and Nonsense

This is a profoundly moving experience, this moving. In the midst of it, I find myself pondering some deep and important questions.

For example: how many pens does one person actually need in her life? Is two enough? Is eleven too many? How about two hundred and eleven?

Apparently, I have a pen fetish. You should have seen me trying to dispose of some of the approximately 211 pens I found mostly in the top drawer of the rolltop desk, but also in dozens of other places. I had to try each one of them on a piece of scribble paper. If it worked, I cringed: should I keep it or give it away?

The only easy ones to release were mostly from resorts and car rental places and plumbers. They’re the kind with the clicker button on the top. The part that’s supposed to clip on your shirt pocket rubs uncomfortably on that soft place between my index finger and my thumb. It upsets me and distracts me from whatever I'm writing. So I got rid of those. Most of them.

I had to save all the stick pens from the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas. I don't think they had the same kind the last time I was there, but they were the best crossword puzzle pens I’ve ever found -- long and smooth with no protuberances, and perfect points with black ink.

Which reminds me of a story. When I was a little girl, I used to sort of fall into whatever book I was reading. While reading Heidi, for instance, I wore a long flannel nightgown and carried a candle upstairs to bed for weeks. I would've sold my little brother for a featherbed and a goat.

I think it was during Little Women that I taped an ostrich feather to a ballpoint pen and wrote with that until I saved enough allowance to buy a fountain pen, then I taped the plume to that and wrote with it for the whole summer. If I held it just right, it made this scritchy sound that instantly transported me into the mid-1800's. I still love fountain pens.

Then there are Sharpies. They are a serious problem when moving. They come in so handy, even if you only use a couple of them.  But can anyone toss out Sharpies that still write? I can't. See what I mean? A pen fetish.

The Pen Drawer, after I went through it -- twice.

And what about paper? How much paper does one human female need, really? How many pads and reams and boxes are enough, and how many are too many? What if it’s colored paper, or the kind that looks like parchment? What if it's in tablets, all clean and new? Or notebooks, all full of expectations? Is it marginally insane to want to keep it all? I have no idea.

I do know one thing: I made a terrible mistake when my son was young and I put “Sticky Notes” on one of my Christmas stocking-present lists. Packets of them appeared in my stocking every Christmas until this past one, when fortunately he asked if I needed any more. A few days ago, I opened the top drawer of one of the other desks and found about 100 little yellow sticky note pads, many still in their cellophane wrappers. What do you do with those? Can you donate them to some charitable cause? Is there a Third World country with a severe shortage of sticky notes? Email me immediately if you know of one.

It’s not only office supplies that I’m pondering, either. What about all those tiny envelopes that say “Extra Buttons” on them? What do those buttons go to? They’re nice looking buttons, but they don’t seem to match anything I have. I don’t believe I’ve ever in my life opened one of those envelopes and used one of those buttons. Still, they seem too pretty to just throw away. Shouldn't someone start an Extra Button Orphanage?

I’m packing as many charity donations as possible in bags, because I have attracted way too many of those, too. I’ve used quite a few of the canvas tote bags with handles, sort of like two-gifts-in-one, for giveaway stuff. I had really a lot of those, and I still have some left.

I’m trying to use the paper shopping bags with handles, but that’s harder. Some of those bags are really fine, with slick heavy paper and good flat bottoms and logos on the side from Chico’s or Nordstrom. Then there are the little bitty ones. They’re so cute, aren’t they? I have too many of those, too. I haven't a clue where they came from, but once they enter my space they usually stay on indefinitely.

I have a great big one from Abercrombie & Fitch that I believe came with a present I bought five or six years ago for my son. I don’t remember what was in it, maybe a jacket, but the bag has soft wide mesh handles and is really sturdy and I’ve been saving it for something ever since. It does have a guy on the side of it with no visible clothes on, so I’ve never really been tempted to carry it around in public.  Not a bad idea though, now that I think about it. Maybe it’s a beach bag for San Pancho...hmmm...

Of all the deep and important questions I've been pondering this last week, this is the major one: what is it with women and empty boxes? 

Maybe not all women are this way, but plenty I know are. They are the ones whose first remark upon removing the colorful wrapping paper from a birthday present is, "Can I keep the box?"

I'm guessing it's a disease passed through female DNA strands.

I come from a long line of women who keep empty boxes full of empty boxes full of empty boxes. It is functionally impossible for any of us to throw out a good box. By good, I mean any box of any material that is clean and straight and has a top.

My mother is worse than I am. When we were looking in her closet for sandals for her to take to San Pancho, three out of four shoe boxes on her top shelf were empty. But I'm not one to throw stones. You should see all the small cardboard jewelry boxes I found in my room. The little tiny earring-size ones, the slightly bigger bracelet-size ones, the necklace-size ones that still have flat white cotton in the bottom. I get the twitches when I think about throwing them away.

I will toss them out, I promise. Because I'm not going to do what my aunt did and move from one house to another with a giant box labeled "Empty Boxes".

Honest.

                                   ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒

                                 ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒    ❒

Every New Beginning

I've begun to see the beginning of some progress.

A nearly empty basement, once filled with miscellaneous tools and paints, old toys, rugs, scraps of wood molding, boxes we hadn't opened in years.

All sorted through now, sent this way and that, dispersed and distributed...

...or outside and ready for the dump run.

A clean front porch, where last week stood twenty bags and boxes beneath a plastic tarp -- and this morning nine more -- waiting in windblown rain for the charity to take away.

A few emptied shelves and (especially) file drawers that took a ridiculous number of hours to get that way.

A cardboard box by the back door, ready for recycling next Wednesday.

It's an old box that I found in the spare bedroom closet earlier today. I'd forgotten it was there. I actually groaned when I saw it. I opened it with a familiar dread, a dread born of conflicted feelings.

Inside the box were pounds and pounds of lined notebook paper on which was handwritten a novel I spent a lot of time on long ago. I always thought I'd get back to it someday. Revise it. Or use parts of it. Or something. I didn't, but I couldn't seem to get rid of it, either. 

Today I did.

I sat beside the fireplace for an hour or so, feeding pages into the flames. I kept the first page. I always liked it best.

The heat felt great.

 

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. ~ Seneca

 

                                                ✒    ✒    ✒

A Little Miracle

"And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?"    Tillie Olsen

In 1985, when we bought This Old House, it was a fixer-upper in every way. It had been rented for several years by a goofy and deadly serious troop who followed a guru and only wore magenta. The dryer vented directly back into the basement, so the rough wood beams, the studs and the cobwebs were festooned with pink lint.

Still, I was pregnant and thrilled to be embarking on a new adventure. The house had great bones underneath its lint and layers upon layers of peeling paint. The only place the paint wasn't peeling was on the fireplace, where it was thick as troweled concrete. I don't know when we noticed that there appeared to be some sort of relief on the face of it, a faint symmetrical protrusion showing through the frosting.

I decided I needed to know what it was.

Over the course of several weeks, with paint thinner and scrapers, we began to attack it. I remember the day, using a toothbrush now, when I first realized there was a picture beginning to show itself.

Like an archeologist on a dig, I reached for finer tools: a wooden skewer, then a toothpick, lifting the paint from lines, indentations, patterns. One day, as I wiped off the curls of white residue from what now seemed a plaque or a tile buried there, I saw color, faint and mysterious, beginning to emerge.

I worked that day until all was revealed.

The picture that materialized was quite wonderful, especially given that it was in a 1909 Victorian-ish Seattle house that had nothing in it -- nothing at all -- even somewhat related. I was delighted then not only by its oddness, but by its evocative and captivating subject matter. 

As I slog through this job, I am reminded of those early months in this house. Some days are as thick as the paint beneath which lay a treasure. My head, as I write this, feels filled with clouds.

When do we have time to remember, to sift, to weigh? These days, I am remembering, I am sifting, I am weighing. 

Every box and drawer holds its memories. I sift through piles of photos and keepsakes, stories written with exuberant childish illustrations, funny notes and bits of conversation I scrawled at odd moments so as not to forget them. I culled my closet yesterday, went through the baby clothes in the attic the day before. More drawers are emptied, more clothes hangers revealed in their nakedness, dangling there looking confused.

I don't find it possible not to look at everything. I weigh decisions: to keep or not to keep? I'm being pretty good, really I am. But some items are so much a part of my life-up-to-now that they cannot be discarded.

(Then again, there are twenty more boxes and bags waiting for the charity, so obviously a lot of things I'm still finding are very discardable.)

Meanwhile, work continues on this old house. My brother spent two days under the kitchen sink replacing the faucet and fixing leaks. In the basement, he helped me move things out, and finished the paint job kindly begun over the holidays by our son. I had a helper today with cleaning, although she had to work over and under and around the incomplete projects piled in every room. 

I received an email of encouragement this week from Travis in which he mentioned the daily little miracles of living in Mexico and told me to hurry up and get there.

"Little miracles." Which brings me back to the story at the beginning of this post.

You know how sometimes you just get used to things being in front of you and don't pay all that much attention? I'll tell you the truth, although it makes me seem somewhat stupid: I really hadn't looked closely at that tile (for that's what it was) for many years, even though I had built fires in the firebox beneath it countless times.

The other day, I looked. Really looked. This time, I was more than delighted. I was astonished.

I think I'll leave the estimating and totaling for the future.

                                        ❍    ❍    ❍