HerRead

Last year I was awarded a substantial grant to travel to Mexico in C.D's footsteps (thank you Institute for Research on Women & Gender at UofM, I am still pinching myself), my first visit to this great country. My spanish is mostly non existant (I'm working on it) but we speak in many tongues and much transcends my vast ignorance....

Here we are in our first stop...the stunningly beautiful city of Guanajuato.

A few favorite things:

cats on high balcony walls (not pictured, they are fast!)

the scale which feels so beautifully human: the brick street outside our flat so narrow to get out stops traffic: a line of cars, scooters, delivery trucks stacked up the hill and no one honking as we heave luggage out the boot and scurry to hug the walls and let the patient carry on

how from the balcony i could look and look and look day after day and always see something new...today that wash of green, the same shade as the metal bars of that window four teirs down.

the everywhere brightly enameled and terracotta pots with their tended living sculptures, ruffling or blooming or prickly or all at once, azalea cascading through the cavity of a stucco wall, the insistant coos of pigeons, church bells I only sometimes made sense of, but which are clearly not decorative, wrung with insistance and expediancy (what kind of job to ring the bell every quarter hour? and how am i only now considering the ways churches have been real time time keepers... betimes assaulting with time?)

the color color color--especially varying shades of previous washes permeating through the foremost's crumble

the simultaneity of composition and decomposition, a light dust on the freshly laundered clothes left too long on the line

and the beautiful snarls of electrical wires!! more on those to come...

Guanajuanto, queremos volver a ti y quedarnos. Gracias.