San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
With long-distance travel still way off the on jet-streaked horizon, I've been returning in my mind — and through my 50,000+ photo hard drive — to some of my favorite roams. Today I poured myself a glass of velvety Casa Dragones tequila, sat back on the couch with my doe-eyed chihuahua, and took us on a trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
As the Dragones burned a leggy road down my gullet, Posie and I wandered through San Miguel’s original town center, a brightly colored and cobblestoned fortification built in the16th century and now a World Heritage Site. We passed by the city’s hundreds of wildly colored doors and the often elaborate and colorful courtyards hidden behind them. We strolled through the Mercado San Juan de Dios farmers market, taking in the smell of more chilis than I have names for while gazing at unfamiliar sauces and snacks, an enormous variety of edible cactus, a wide-smiling grandmother selling Chinese-made plastic shopping bags, and several of Posie’s long-distance relatives. Then, mind-traveling miles out of town, we walked through the ruins of the Cañada de la Virgen archaeological site, where ancient rituals were once conducted by the Otomi atop the site’s formidable stone pyramid.
As the sun started its slow descent outside my apartment window here in Seattle, we hit the hills above San Miquel and made our way through the Charco Del Ingenio Jardin. Even from our yellow velvet couch, we could feel the red dirt trails beneath our feet, see sheep grazing under the trees, and, in Posie’s drool at the thought of chasing geckos sunbathing on garden rocks.
Posie can sit curled up on a couch all day — that’s what chihuahuas do. But eventually my butt got tired from hours of sit-traveling. I slid the photo gallery off my lap, stood up, stretched, and looked out our real window into the gray cloud cover that is Seattle in March. The rain here holds for me an equal if different attraction. But my plane of recollection had not yet quite returned me from San Miguel, so I closed my eyes one last time. The deep warmth of a Mexico sun made my face glow. Or perhaps it was that final sip of tequila.
I’ll return to San Miguel once all this waiting to reconnect with the world is over. No question on that one. It’s got a world-renowned writer’s conference I’ve been itching to attend. In the meantime, I am glad to have saved all the photos, as well as this piece which I wrote after a Jardin visit in 2017.
Today in the Garden
Today colors rose up
From the ground
Alive, alive and breathing
Sunflowers by the thousands
Tangoing with the breeze
A yellow, so molten
It seemed the sun laid down
In the field
Across these blazing blooms
A flash of fire, a spark in the air
A blood red bird
A warbler I think
Spread her wings
In a sky the blue of Mary’s robe
And dotted with crisp white
Looney Tunes clouds
She flew like fireworks
Among sharp-tined cacti
They were the color of guacamole
With a pinch of paprika
And from their barbs
Striped-legged spiders
Wove a sticky silk
Into luminous veils
And waited so patiently for
The unfortunate bride
To happen by
Here the lichen
Laid itself across the rocks
In calico colors,
Not-quite turquoise,
Mustard yellow and pastel green
Spread out side-by-side
A painter’s palette
And the picture painted
At the same time
In the canyon below
Fatigue-green water
Made the white of egrets
And wide-winged cranes
Impossibly
More brilliant
As they rose
Like decision-made smoke
From the papal tower
All around, a harmony
Sung by grass-green crickets
Melding into green grass
And by stone-gray lizards
Disappearing before my eyes
Into the gray stones
And by the leaves shaking
In the wind
Maracas for the chorus
And then came the solos,
Muddy sheep bah-bahing under emerald trees
Ducks honking on a lake
Buzzing bees, bleating goats
And two chocolate brown colts
Neighing under the sun
With each step
In this garden
A spray of butterflies took flight,
Orange, yellow, white, black
Like a shower of confetti
Tossed in front of a hero
Like cloaks laid down
For a queen
To cushion and color
Her stroll
The book was wrong
We were not cast out
This is Eden
Nurtured and preserved
A cathedral still open
No apples in site.
~ Cheryl Murfin, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 2017
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