Mom n Pops are in Oaxaca right now, enjoying a much needed break. Pops just got done with a two week spanish immersion course and mom, well, she’s a totally working crazy person, so she needs a vacation perpetually.
I received this email from her today:
This place is incredible. Amazing. It’s very old and very beautiful, and it feels like we’re living, like, 50 years ago. Here, everybody is very Indian. And they are beautiful. Very strong bone structure. Incredible hair, dark, thick, straight. Eyes deep with the wisdom of the ages. I wish we lived here. What a place. We went on a pilgrimage yesterday, to one of the towns where the men carve little wooden figures and the women paint them. I wanted to track down my favorite artist. We found him, way back in the hills, mountains, really, on a farm. His fence was rancho. We passed through a stile into a small yard where he kept his goats and his chickens, then through another yard where his wife (barely four feet tall, white hair in a braid to her waist) was drying corn husks for tamales, and then finally in to his house where the great man, full of joyful welcoming, had just emerged from a stone bath in yet another yard. He asked us what we wanted and I told him he was my favorite carver and that I had had a beautitiful sirena who was holding her mermaid baby, and that I had loved that mermother more than anything but that Sugar had eaten it and that I was hoping I could buy another. He told me he would be happy to carve me a mermother and that he would send it to me in Nayarit. He asked for $150 pesos (10.5 to the dollar). I tried to pay him more but he wouldn’t take it. Then he brought out a privately-printed book on the Nelson A. Rockefeller collection of Mexican art and showed us the cover, which was a photo of a beautifully carved, and very magic, cart pulled by two donkeys. He told us that was his carving there, on the cover. His grandson insisted we take a picture of us with the old man, and when we did, I burst in to tears. The whole thing, the goats, the tamale skins, the stone bath, were just too overwhelming.
From the looks of things, she’s doing fine.
Your momma inspires me. Thanks for sharing this wonderful experience.