Sur, Sure

Giros: South again. Out the bus window the agave plants are like dandelions covering the emerging green hills, which also carry shadows of the clouds overhead. The land is yellow and green and brown, looking very dry. We are leaving a small farm in Puebla, where I passed a day mopping, washing dishes, weeding a radish patch, and preparing several baskets of lettuce seed. The farm is in the valley of Puebla, a volcano in each corner, all of which, if not active, are awake. Popocatepetl, a rumbling and powerful giant, Iztaccíhuatl, his sleeping partner, el Malinche, and finally, el Pico de Orizaba, the largest volcano in all of Mexico, whose snowy peak appeared between wispy clouds. They say the land here has a powerful energy and I was only there for a day and a half but I did observe that I continuously dropped things and my mind was a little cloudy.

Our bus continues to round bends and ascend and descend. The ground is grey now, someone is on the side of the road looking out over a cavity in the earth. Cactus stand on the mountains like porcupine quills. Fallen rocks and unsteady mountains sides are out either window, the beauty and immenseness of the south is coming back to me.

A few nights ago we waited on the side of a highway for a woman named Kumara, one of the farm's owners. She picked us up and drove us in the dark to her little "paraiso," as she called it. We bumped along on a dirt road past truck after truck after truck piled high with flowers that are the essence of fuschia and gold. They are the flowers for the ofrendas, the altars to the dead, that are in every home and on the streets, in universities and restaurants, because in these days the dead will be coming back to celebrate with the living. Celebrations are taking place all over the country and these flowers are being rapidly cut, piled in the backs of pick up trucks and transported all over the Republica. Not only for ofrendas, people also scatter them in crosses and other designs with a path that leads the dead right to their front door. The sight is beautiful and the air sweetly fragrant.

The next night we bumped along again in the dark, this time 11 of us were piled into a small, wooden wagon pulled by a small but hardworking horse. We arrive to a pueblo nearby, several boys in the town are blocking off different streets with string, stopping cars to ask for pesos, not candy.

When the sun sets, the clouds look like they are made out of smoke, the pink haze cast by the sun is made purplish by the remaining clear blue of the sky, shadows multiply and distort the landscape and when the sun finally drops past the horizon, I miss it.

Sabor: Now we are in Oaxaca, surrounded by mountains and full of colorful and vibrating energy. This morning I laid in a hammock at our host's house and the smells of chocolate, garlic and chiles, repeatedly washed over me, covered me, so strongly that I felt as if I were in a kitchen watching an experienced woman make mole. Occasionally a cool breezes carried the smells away but each time they returned stronger than before. Later, our host's roommate tells us that their neighbor's mother promised them mole this afternoon. Even the air in Oaxaca can be tasted.