With Barb and Rod

Barbara Steers gave me the name of a man, Hector, who has a taxi service in La Penita. She suggested that I might want him to pick me up at the Hotel Rosita and drive me to their house.  I arranged everything with him by email, but finally, he couldn’t make it because he had a cold, so his brother Anthony took his place.  He arrived an hour late because of an accident on the road, but all went well once he did.  Anthony has a fruit juice stand in front of his father’s grocery in Rincon and wants to learn English so that he can explain his juices to gringos, and I want to learn Spanish to keep my mind alive and be able to talk to locals, so we spent the drive teaching each other.  He took me by his stand and introduced me to his mother, father and wife before driving me to Barb and Rod’s.  Today the three of us rode our bikes to Anthony’s stand to buy some juice to drink before riding to another beach.  We learned about 3 fruits we’d never heard of before and would probably never have tasted because they are not terribly attractive to look at, but they are supposed to be good for you.  We tried yaca juice mixed with orange, grapefruit and a bit of honey.  It was delicious, and I’m sure it’s going to help get rid of the cold I’ve got.  I’m a bit of a mess at the moment because my right shoulder still aches when I move it certain ways, and it’s almost 2 weeks since I slid and fell on some snow covered ice on the road home from Knox Mountain, and I have a full blown, with an accent on the blow, blew and blown, cold.  Fortunately Barb and Rod haven’t started yelling, “ Unclean, unclean” at me. 

Barbara bought a third bike to have for guests, so we’ve gone for a few good rides.  Friday, we went across the highway and back into the pineapple fields and mango plantations.  The roads are dusty, dry and rough.  It’s hard to believe that on either side such juicy fruits are growing, but they are, and the plants and trees are a variety of healthy greens.  Colorful flowers that look like pink, wild sweet peas climb up the thick gnarled branches that function as fence posts and blue morning glories bloom at places under the barbed wire.  The layered hills in the distance are a mixture of mist and steely blue.  The countryside is like Mexico itself, simultaneously bright and beautiful and poor and dusty.  On this ride we saw the yaca fruit that we drank at Anthony’s stand.  It was quite large, although not full grown, and hanging pendulously from trees.  But we didn’t know what it was at the time.

The casita at Barbara and Rod’s drips with masses of bright orange honeysuckle mixed with pink bouganvilla.  It’s always a shady, breezy place to relax in and watch interesting wild life.  I’ve been keeping my eye on a large iguana that lives at the moment in a palm tree behind the casita.  Last night we saw a crocodile in the estuary that runs beside it.  You can see many different types of heron, green, great blue and night, as well as hummingbirds and graceful, large, white egrets and ibis and many other birds that only Barb can name, so they shall go nameless in this blog.  At the moment, we are resting in the casita after a morning pedal to the bike repair shop, the coffee store, grocery store and the stand that sells shrimp.  Rod just spotted a strange looking duck and Barbara is trying to figure out what it is. 

After a few days alone in Vallarta, it’s good to be back with friends.  I’ve said it before, but life without Jim still seems a bit like half a life because I do things but don’t have anyone to plan them with or discuss them with later.  It’s as silent as the sound of one hand clapping.  However, thinking, writing and being with friends and relatives certainly helps. When you live alone, there is no need to compromise or take anyone else’s priorities into consideration, no one to argue with or to blame for.  No one hears your complaints so why bother making them.  You are responsible and that clarifies a lot of things.  But I miss the blur, the sharing of married life, the conversation and compromise, the arguments and embraces.  

 Me in Barb and Rod's garden, wearing the pant suit Jay sent me from Korea for Christmas

 

The iguana in the palm behind the casita

Barb and Rod in front of a strangler fig on the bike ride through the pineapple fields

 

Me in the crack of the strangler fig.  These trees grow around and eventually kill a tall palm that a bird has dropped a seed onto the top of.

 

Green yaca hanging from the lower branches of the tree.  When ripe, they are quite large, bumpy and brownish green.

 

A pineapple field surrounded by a barbed wire fence with hanging pink sweet peas.

 

My idea of an art shot of the beach we biked to from the restaurant where we ate.