At the end of May, the rains finally came. Like Someone in the heavens flipped a switch. Many afternoons turn dark and dramatic now, thunder moving through the mountains, lightning over the lake. Everything is turning green and soaking it up. And so am I.
When people imagine moving to another country, they usually imagine the move itself.
The paperwork and the uncertainty. The decision and the work it takes to move.
But what comes next? Because eventually you stop moving, and you start building a life.
I love this season. The cooler air and the drama of the storms. The way everything seems to breathe again. And this land and sky continue to reveal themselves to me.
As spring progressed here in central Mexico, I started to lose my bearings a little. I mean my actual bearings.
I’ve thought of myself as pretty good at directions, but one afternoon I noticed the sun in a place I had never seen before: in the north.
That couldn’t be right. Could it?
For my entire life, living in the northern hemisphere, the sun had always crossed the sky to the south. Of course it rises in the east and sets in the west. But at midday it always sits somewhere in the southern half of the sky.
So why was I looking north and seeing the sun? Why were my north facing windows getting direct sunlight?
I was so certain something was wrong that I checked a compass.
The compass said I was right. The sun was north.
For a moment I had that strange, out-of-body feeling you get when something you’ve taken for granted your whole life suddenly stops being true. It felt like I’d slipped into an alternate universe and someone had rearranged the sky.
And I couldn’t explain it. Then a local man (thanks to Mark Emmer!) posted a short explanation on a community message board about what it’s like to live so close to the Tropic of Cancer, and suddenly it all made sense.
We’re only about four degrees south of it here. In late spring, the sun crosses, at its zenith, directly overhead and then keeps going. For a few weeks each year, the noon sun is actually north of us before beginning its journey south again later in the summer.
It’s not a big thing, really. But watching the sun travel across a part of the sky where your brain says it doesn’t belong makes you realize how many assumptions you carry around without ever even noticing them.
I’ve lived on this planet for nearly six decades and this place still managed to surprise
The Tropic of Cancer is one of the five major parallels of latitude that mark significant astronomical and climatic boundaries on Earth. By definition, it is the northernmost latitude at which the sun can appear directly overhead at solar noon — an event that happens once a year, on the June solstice. North of the Tropic of Cancer, the sun is never directly overhead; south of it, the sun reaches zenith at least twice a year (once on the way north, once on the way south).
My neighbor Fausto also came to my rescue and did surgery on this big Nopales. It had to be pruned in order to fix the fence and Fausto was so helpful!
Hector made great progress rebuilding the fence, but we’ve had a hard time getting galvanized screws so he’s taking a break from that and working on my dilapidated “greenhouse”. And I use that word loosely. It’s a dilapidated structure sheltering the roses and a couple of my tomato plants. As you can see it was falling apart and Hector is doing his magic.
Hector is a jewel, always on time, cheerful and happy to work, and there seems little he can’t do.
The sky wasn’t the only thing that surprised me lately. Around the same time, the people of Pátzcuaro did what they do: they threw a celebration I didn’t see coming.
Corpus Christi is a Catholic holiday, but what I watched in the streets was something older: a Purépecha tradition, called K’uanikukua, that’s been woven into it for centuries.
It’s a tradition rooted in gratitude for the harvest, for rain, for what the land provides. And it was beautiful!
After Corpus Christi the rains really came, and all that hot dry weather became a distant memory. Cool and wet, almost every afternoon. Which meant it was the perfect time to plant trees.
I went to the nursery and was delighted with more options than I expected. My gardener Javier, and his son Javier, helped me dig the holes. We put in an avocado, a tabachin, an apricot, two ash trees, and eight little cedars. Thirteen trees total.
The timing was deliberate. With rain arriving almost every day I don’t have to haul water out to baby trees in the field. The sky is doing that for me.
You know you’ve passed an age threshold when you start watching the birds. And I am there. There’s something exciting going on in this nest under my kitchen eves. Seems like one bird after another is swooping by and the main bird didn’t even fly away when I approached. So I set up a camera.
Most of the projects around here involve fixing something that already exists. Planting trees feels different. Planting is an act of optimism. One of the few things that’s almost entirely about the future.
You put something in the ground and you wait. Years. Maybe decades. I find that extraordinarily peaceful. And I love watching things grow.
Some of the most meaningful changes happen slowly enough that you barely notice them. Like living somewhere long enough to learn its rhythms.
I know some of you are watching this from a desk you’ve been sitting at for twenty years. I was too.
Thirty years as a nurse, measuring everything in minutes and seconds. Now I’m planting trees. I think that says it all.
If you want to see more of what’s happening here at the finca — the progress, the setbacks, the frogs — the channel membership is where I share that kind of thing in between videos.
Short videos, the occasional photo, whatever’s happening that week. Just a closer look. Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUVqgUrAF6dB_jAgaY4Ekwg/join
