• Creative Non-fiction,  Essays,  Food,  Uncategorized

    Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch

    Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

    – Charles R. Swindoll

    I suppose my first grade teacher deposited this one.

     

    My son recently sent me a note with a couple of photos he took of Pawpaws he picked “in the wild” from an island in the Potomac River near Washington, DC.

    When I looked at his pictures, a flood of memories from the public elementary school I attended hit me. And this song we sang magically reappeared:

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays,  Food,  Uncategorized

    Camarones Gigantes

    “The term Jumbo Shrimp has always amazed me. What is a Jumbo Shrimp? I mean, it’s like Military Intelligence – the words don’t go together, man.”      George Carlin

     

    Driving east from Papantla, we first hit the Gulf of Mexico at the Veracruz beach town of Tecolutla. It was an early summertime Friday and it seemed as if everyone in eastern Mexico had the same idea—let’s go to the beach. We found a small hotel and quickly joined the crowds cooling themselves in the soft breezes and inviting waters.

    ***

    The following day we wanted to see more of the seaside village. So we walked over to the riverfront where the mouth of the Rio Tecolutla enters the Gulf  and defines the southeast corner of the town.

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays

    The Angels of Ek’ Balam

    Wailuku Mayan Angels

    Angels in a Mayan pyramid? Surely not Christian angels as we think of angels in a church or pictured in an illustrated Bible with pseudo-Renaissance prints…

    No. Although they do look a lot like the kind of angels we think of seeing in a Christian context, I prefer to understand these angels as naturalistic people dressed up like birds.

    ***

    The Mayan archaeological site of Lyrica order form Ek’Balam, Black Jaguar, in north central Yucatán is not only home to angels, but also to a monster.

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays,  Uncategorized

    Motmots at Uxmal

    In 1989 while working on a business venture in Belize, I took several days to look for wildlife around the Coxcomb Reserve.

    I am interested in birds and was lucky to see Scarlet Macaws near the village of Red Bank. One dark night on a mountain trail I saw a small wild cat, a Margay, exposed by the headlights of our jeep. Also I saw some huge snakes, boa constrictors—locally called Wolas, and one aggressive venomous Fer de Lance—a serpent Belizeans call a Tommygoff.

    One bird I was particularly interested in seeing was the Motmot. These birds have long ‘paddle tails’ and electric coloring. They are easy to identify. For me however, finding the Motmot in the wild proved elusive. After spending a good part of three days looking around the edges of the Coxcomb Reserve and adjacent banana plantations, I gave up and decided that Motmots were just not destined to make my list.

    ***

    When Alice and I were driving around Mexico looking for a place to settle, we spent six weeks in Mérida—trying the city on for size.

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays

    The Tell

    A Tell is what is demonstrated when a poker player, grifter or salesman—some person who wants to know something about his subject’s future—discovers a clue that enables him to predict whether a person is sincere or not—lying or being truthful.

    Sometimes, A Tell may be delivered by a third party. For instance, in an old I Love Lucy episode, Lucy sees Desi’s poker hand and her big facial exclamations telegraph to the other players his great hand. Of course, the other players fold leaving Desi disappointed.

    ***

    In January, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico is an almost perfect place to be. Christmas is over and the weather is sunny with a fresh light breeze blowing every day from the ocean. Humpback whales cruise around the protected waters of Bahia Banderas, Mexico’s largest bay. They are busy with mating and birthing their calves. And, the city is full of grateful refugees from the frozen north.

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays

    Formal Attire

    Black-necked Stilts

    Candelero Mexicano

    Picture a busy business executive dressed in a tuxedo while grabbing a bite in a sandwich shop at the beach. There’s no reason to wear dull clothing even when eating a mundane meal.

    Yelapa, a small coastal village accessible by boat on Mexico’s Bahia de Banderas, is where we first found Black-necked Stilts. Then living in Guanajuato, we had fled a cold snap. After taking a bus to Puerto Vallarta, we traveled by shuttle boat across the bay to Yelapa.  Our room overlooked the lagoon formed where a river, Rio Tuito, meets the ocean waters. This was our week to warm up.

    On our first morning, as I prepared breakfast while looking out over the lagoon, I was delighted to spot a group of unfamiliar shorebirds. They appeared to be similar to the American Avocets we’d often seen in coastal North Carolina—both with a slight upturns to their thin bills. Watching them forage along the alluvial banks, we noted a most striking difference. These birds were wearing full formal attire.

    American Avocet

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays

    A Gift of Color

    nopal-cochineal-fs 

    Note the white flecks on the blooming nopal

    Blue jacaranda petals shower the ground and nopal pads 

     

    I rubbed my fingers across the flakey white stuff on the side of a nopal cactus in our jardin, intending to catch for closer examination a little of what appeared to be white powder. I had seen something like this in my North Carolina vegetable garden—little white scaly mealybugs on my tomatoes. Glancing down at my hand, It startled me to see bright red across my fingertips.

    Did I cut myself?

    Ahhh, this must be the way some Native American discovered cochineal dyes.

    When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the 1500s, they found the Aztecs  producing vibrant red cochineal-dyed fabrics—far brighter than anything available in Europe. Further, these dyes retained their color for a very long time. The little creature responsible is the cochineal, Dactylopius coccus, a scaled insect native throughout sub-tropical Mexico, Central America and sub-tropical South America.

  • Creative Non-fiction,  Essays

    Henequén

    henequen-fs 

    In 1984, Alice and I visited Mérida. Then, the people called it La Ciudad Blanca, The White City. In addition to the whitewashed buildings, many residents wore white. Most men wore loose-fitting pleated white shirts, guayaberas, white trousers and fine woven straw hats from the nearby town of Becal. Women wore white dresses with heavy embroidery and bright-colored floral patterns. The city appeared clean and prosperous.

    What we didn’t realize then was we were witnessing the very end of the Henequén Era in the Yucatán.

    In the 1950s, nylon rope began to take the place of rope made from the natural fibers of the henequén and sisal plants. By 1984, the last viable commercial harvest of these crops had taken place in the Yucatán. The henequén industry which created enormous wealth-producing plantations using slave-like company store labor was over.

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