5 April 2014 
You may recall that our Mex ’14 Blog 21, “Family Visit”
closed with a photo of the family in a bean field in San Pablo Etla
looking at the mountains. Linda and I like the view so much that we decided to
buy the bean field and build a house on it. Our purchase offer has been  accepted and we are over the first third of the legal hurdles to finalize the
deal. We’ve cut some carrizo cane to
clear up the boundary sight lines. We have hired an
architect and are two thirds along in finalizing a design. Our future-ex-home
in Kingston will soon be on the market. We have begun sorting through our
forty-year accumulation of chachquis and memory boxes to choose which four
things to take with us.
The bean field is called El
Tanque, from the ruins of a large cistern or water tank that is at least a
half-century old. The property is technically in Santa Cruz Etla, a very small
village now somewhat subsumed by the slightly larger San Pablo Etla. From the
bits of flotsam speckled through the bean rows, El Tanque has been lived on
from the burnished gray Monte Albán era (say 2200 years ago) through the Coca
Cola era. We are getting to know the seven neighbor families who border on the
property. There is a mango tree, a guayaba, and a few coffee bushes. At the
foot of the property is the village’s single paved road, Calle Independencia.
It is not that we are feeling stodgy, but it’s time for
something new. And the half-a-year here, half-a-year there of the last decade
or so seems to have turned us into permanently temporary residents. So we’ve
decided to turn the “there” into “here” and put down some new roots where the
sun shines a lot, the snow never falls, and all the horizons have mountains on
them.
You may also recall that last season’s Blog 21 included a
photo of San Antonio Martyr having his hair parted  with an axe.
As Linda and I
sort boxes and look out at our little Kingston meadow and think about distance
and our many New England friends, the pain of parting is very real. But we will
continue to visit the polar north from time to time (there are direct flights from Houston to Oaxaca), and our architect’s
drawings include a small guest cottage next to the main house for you to come
visit and get to know our future new home in Santa Cruz Etla.
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