shoestring gringa

We had an amazing hailstorm about a week ago, the sort that renews your respect for old Ma Nature’s capacity for destruction.  It blew in all of a sudden, pounding everything with a ferocity that was truly breathtaking.  Giant, wind-propelled hailstones slammed into windows, tore branches from the trees, and stripped leaves from branches.   They weren’t as big as golfballs, but they were bigger than large-sized marbles.  The temperature dropped maybe 20 degrees in a matter of minutes.

Hailstones

We scurried around in our flimsy summer clothes and rubber sandals, unplugging leaf-clogged drains so the deluge of water could exit from the patios.

Even though hailstorms are common here in summer, this one had a different feel to it.  I think we’re going to have a long, cold, and early winter this year.

Outside patio after hailstorm

One adaptation I have not been able to make since living in Mexico is the midday dinner hour.  People eat their main meal around noon here.  I’ve tried to make the switch several times, but have never made it stick.

It’s ironic, because for years I yearned to be able to dine at midday.  It seemed (it still seems) so much healthier to consume your biggest meal when you have some chance of burning it off, rather than a couple hours before falling into bed.

But I just haven’t been able to do it.

Well, that’s not totally true.  It’s no problem if I’m not doing the cooking.  When the Mexigringo was fixing up our casita in Yucatan, we ate every day at a cocina economica around 2 p.m., and had either nothing or takeout pizza in the evening, having no cooking facilities where we were staying.  I lost 14 pounds in six weeks.  I was overjoyed to say the least.

Eating at midday is fine.  Cooking at midday is the problem.  In order to serve dinner by 2 p.m., I need to start preparations at noon, and that’s assuming I’ve managed to take out some meat to defrost at the crack of dawn, an hour at which the only foodstuffs I care to contemplate are coffee and bread.  It’s really hard for me to work up the necessary enthusiasm so early in the day.  Conditioned by years of minimal lunches while working, and having breakfasted at 8 or 9, not 5 a.m., motivation is severely lacking.  Also, being vegetarian by inclination (though no longer in practice being married to the Mexican carnivore), dealing with raw meat that early in the day grosses me out entirely.

I’ve also found that eating at midday trashes my productivity, if trying to accomplish anything other than cooking and housework.  When I was painting, I worked best painting steadily from breakfast until 5 or 6 p.m., with a couple of quick dashes to the kitchen for some fruit or chocolate.  Having to drop everything between noon and 3 is fatal, and chances of returning to work afterward are slim at best.  After eating a big meal in the middle of the day, what I most want is a siesta, preferably in a hammock.  Failing that, I crave the forbidden pleasure of strong coffee to carry on.

And then, we’ve found that half the time we get hungry again in the evening, having given the old stomach a workout at noon.  It’s the road to ruin for sure.

And so we continue to dine at 6 or 7, four years on.  It’s hardly ideal.  Our health probably suffers.  And, worse, people who are going to drop in tend to do so around 5 p.m.  Fortunately for us, this doesn’t happen very often, but even so.  Every so often — usually after an unexpected run of these ill-timed social calls — I resolve to mend my ways, and get with the local program.   But it never lasts.  And in the end, I’ve decided that maybe some things are just not worth changing.  I’m never going to be at ease pounding cutlets at noon, or walking on cobblestone streets in three-inch heels.  And you know, it’s ok.  So be it.

It wasn’t like we needed another room, but the space just begged for it.  It was originally a small front entry porch, with a bathroom inexplicably off of it.  Well, any bathroom which required leaving the house to enter definitely had to go.  Also, the space looked out over the glorious view.  So, we knocked down the bathroom and enclosed the space, extending it from what is now the dining area just off the kitchen.  The view is visible from all three rooms:  kitchen, dining, and living room, where we spend most of our waking hours.

Building this room from scratch allowed us to put in the kind of windows we like — big, many-paned ones, and a French entry door, facing out respectively onto the view and a small grove of trees in the outer patio.  On the wall opposite the view, another set of windows looks into the small interior patio.  Now there was light.  We covered the floor with local river rock (it was free, a major consideration by that point).

Living room windows

The effect of this room turned out to be quite magical and defines the spirit of the house.  It not only provides a view of the surrounding environment, it creates a sensation of actually being one with it.  Standing in the tree-filtered light, on stones gathered from a nearby riverbed, the boundary between indoors and outdoors is rendered indistinct, almost irrelevant.  The room is made of the stuff of the mountain; the mountain is an ever-changing presence in the room.

Passerby