Leaving for the season

Leaving San Pancho to spend the spring and summer in Connecticut isn’t easy. We rent the house when we are not there, and Casa Skip y Nancy needs to be ship-shape. The countdown begins weeks before my early April departure. Each day I update lengthy to-do lists. Conversations with Skip begin, “Did you remember to (clean the grill, get extra keys…)?”

Our property manager and housekeeper, both capable people, take care of the house in our absence. Nevertheless, I try to anticipate any problem that could arise. A notebook I leave for renters contains exhaustive details: disposal clogged? Here’s where to find the Allen wrench. Dryer not working? Call Lorenzo-the-dryer-guy in Sayulita. I imagine renters thinking as they read the notebook, “An obsessive person wrote this.”

But the hardest part of leaving is saying goodbye to people I care about. I’ll miss my walking buddies, my writers’ group, friends who pop in unannounced. Being part of a community seems effortless in San Pancho. On a one-block walk to the store, I might run into three people who stop for a chat. I seldom have casual, spontaneous encounters in West Haven. Many of my friends are still working, and time with them is planned in advance.

Still, I yearn for my Connecticut life. I’ve got to see my children and grandchildren; if I don’t get back there, too much of their lives will pass me by. The recitals and birthday parties, Middlebrook Elementary’s spring fair, walks in the park with my new grandson – I love all that grandma stuff.

So I pack up and leave San Pancho. When I’m in one place, I miss someone who’s in the other place. And that's not a bad problem to have.

The Lonely Librarian

The small two-story building near the beach on San Pancho’s main street, Tercer Mundo, was home to entreamigos for three years. Children gathered out front for art projects at tables under the grand mango tree in the center of the street. Traffic slowed to creep around it. Massive branches provided shade.

A small, hand-lettered sign led to the “Biblioteca, Library.” A narrow hallway with brightly painted murals. Uneven concrete stairs. Children’s voices. In the largest room, shelves filled with books in Spanish lined the walls; large, colorful picture books beckoned eager readers. A long bench with chairs provided desks for studying and homework help, and amidst tangled wires, computer stations brought the world of the internet.

The dimly lit smallest room in the library held the English collection for adults and children. Here books overflowed the shelves and leaned haphazardly at odd angles, stacked and propped; keeping order, my nemesis. As the volunteer librarian, I was uncompromising; fiction separate from non-fiction, non-fiction organized by topic. I vowed that someday the Dewey Decimal system would prevail.

But entreamigos’ lease had expired, and we had to move. We filled boxes and boxes with books. Carefully, at first, labeling “Libros, espanol, ninos, books, Spanish, children.” Then later, rushed, we simply wrote “libros.” We rolled up the colorful posters, gathered the toys, and took down the shelves.

The small, hand-lettered sign above the door now reads “Se renta, for rent.” The mango tree is gone, a casualty of the newly repaved Tercer Mundo. Entreamigos is a strong and committed organization, however, whose work in San Pancho will continue. We will have a new home in one of the old warehouses in town. In time there will be a new library, and I will be in it, trying to keep order once again.

http://www.entreamigos.org/

Love at First Sight

First-timers to San Pancho are among my favorite house guests, and two more came in the other day. From the minute we turned into town on Avenida Tercer Mundo, they were smitten. It’s those first sights as we head toward the beach for a quick look, sights that make my daughter-the-regular shout, “And action!”

There’s the cowboy on horseback, broad-brimmed sombrero angled low on his brow. The weathered old woman in the ever-present apron, standing erect behind a small wooden table where she sells her bread pudding. A pickup, its bed loaded with laughing kids, bouncing them like beach balls each time it passes over a speed bump.

As happens often enough, these latest newcomers arrived just when I needed them. Bouts with mildew, warped woodwork, and water shortages necessitating cold “Navy showers” were wearing me down. “The re-entry blues,” I called it, coming home to issues after months out of the country. I needed the shot in the arm of people raving about San Pancho and the view from my porch. Who scoffed at my “happy problems” and reinforced my choice of this place on the planet with their sighs of approval as they stared out to sea.

Bird Watching

From time to time a hush comes over the garden. My neighbors’ music players have simultaneously fallen silent. No trucks or busses are using engine brakes on the highway. The children are not playing soccer in the street. Shrimp trucks with loudspeakers are elsewhere. In this preternatural silence the anis fly into the garden. It is hard not to believe that they have some causal relationship to this lacuna in the noisy bustle of San Pancho—as though their unrelieved blackness is connected not only to absence of light, but sound as well.

The Grooved-Billed Ani is a cuckoo-related bird. In side view, nearly half the head is given over to a great, blunt beak. Yes, birds are dinosaurs, I think when I see that profile. Anis lay their eggs, not like cuckoos, in another species’ nest, but in a communal nest of four or five pairs. Their extended family of eight or ten glides in on wings silent as owl’s, and enters the deepest foliage where their blackness is hardly distinguishable from the shadows. There is only the slightest rustle and tremor in the leaves as they move through. The anis make no more sound than the occasional brushing feather. Insects and lizards are not forewarned.

The anis use my garden as their family table. I like intact leaves and healthy color, so our interests coincide. They eat the stink bugs which can suck the life out of hibiscus. It is so quiet I can hear the tiny crunch as the bugs are crushed and I get a whiff of their unmistakable odor. I hold still so the birds will be undisturbed. Even the breeze is careful. Too soon, in twos and threes, they glide silently away.