Power Bill

Two weeks after I moved into my new house in Mexico, the lights went out.

At first, I wasn’t worried. Power goes out here sometimes, especially in rural areas. And usually it flickers back on in a minute. So I assumed it was just one of those little flickers.

Then evening came and I looked across the road.

My neighbors had lights. All of my neighbors.

That was the moment a sneaking suspicion crept into the room:

Should I have paid the electric bill by now?

So I pulled out my phone and went to the electric company’s website, and there it was. Overdue bill. They had cut my power. For non-payment. Me. The woman who used to set up automatic payments for bills that weren’t even due yet.

In my defense, and this is a weak defense, I had never had a Mexican electric bill before. Every rental I’d lived in, the owner just paid it. And somewhere in the deeply American back of my brain, I’d been waiting for a notice. By email. Or, and this is silly, by regular mail.

I have never received a single piece of mail at this house. Not a bill, not a postcard. Not a single coupon. Nothing. The mail does not come here. The mail has never come here. The mail is not coming.

A friend who’d lived here longer than me explained what to do: go to the office, pay the overdue bill, and hope someone comes to turn it back on before too long. So that’s what I did, fully expecting the lights to be on by morning, still thinking, apparently, that I was in the States.

That night, I read by candlelight and went to bed early. There was something almost romantic about it. I love fire.

The next morning, the lights were still off. The romance ended abruptly.

Cause that’s when I remembered that my water pump runs on electricity. No power, no pump. No pump, no running water. This sounds like a small thing until it’s been three days since you took a shower and there is no functioning toilet.

On the second day without power, I was standing in my greenhouse staring at my rain barrel, which was a bright green ecosystem of algae. I dipped a bucket in and carried it to the bathroom to flush the toilet. Thank god for the rain barrel.

I had spent years of my life scrubbing in for surgery. Three minutes at the sink. Every finger, every nail bed. Ensuring Sterile fields with Sterile gloves. And here I was, dipping a bucket into a barrel of algae water to flush my toilet.

What had felt briefly romantic became something else all together. As normal people went on with their normal lives, I spent three days maniacally focused on listening for the hum of the refrigerator. I begged a friend to let me charge my devices and use her wifi. The craving for a hot shower, or any shower, became an obsession and I developed a completely new appreciation for watching television.

Eventually the power came back on, three days later. When I could hear the little water pump working I jumped for joy and immediately hit the shower. 

Now I keep several large bottles of tap water in the house. At least next time I’ll be able to flush the toilet without the algae.

Lesson learned: pay your electric bill. They are not going to remind you.

Pacific Coast

Years before I moved to Mexico, I’d fallen in love with the Pacific coast. Palm trees, sunsets, ocean breeze. I loved the way the mountains met the sea. It was paradise.

It turns out paradise in January isn’t necessarily paradise in May.

The trips I’d taken there were always short, always in winter. I remembered the way the light hit the water in the late afternoon, the smell of salt in the warm air, walking barefoot at sunset and feeling, for a few days, like nothing back home could reach me.

What I didn’t know was what that same coast feels like in April and May. When the air barely cools down at night. When you wake at three in the morning and the heat is still there, pressing against you, and your dogs are panting on the floor. That’s when you realize this isn’t a heat wave.

This is the climate.

The place I’d fallen in love with was real. It just wasn’t the whole place. I’d only met one version of it.

I think this is what a lot of us get wrong when we dream about moving somewhere new. We fall in love with a place during its best season, then imagine living in that version forever.

But a place has to work on an ordinary Tuesday. Not just a Saturday in February.

A Tuesday in May, when nothing special is happening, you have errands to run, the washing machine just broke, and it’s still ninety-five degrees at ten o’clock at night.

That’s the test. And it’s the one I hadn’t given it.

And that’s how I figured out what I needed. I didn’t know in advance that April and May are the hottest months in Mexico. The dogs and I left Oregon in late March and spent the next several weeks on the Pacific coast, one town, then another. It happened to be a particularly hot year, but I learned later that those months are always the worst when it comes to heat.

The rental I’d booked for most of that time didn’t have air conditioning. The heat was life-changing. We hid from the sun all day. I froze wet towels and laid them across the dogs during the hottest hours. I closed every curtain in the house. The ceiling fan just moved hot air around. Eventually I broke the rental early and we evacuated into a place with AC that I didn’t really like, just because I needed to be able to breathe.

Then I started moving and exploring. Inland, through Colima, into the mountains of Jalisco. Lake Chapala was still hot and dry. Up through Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende. And finally, further south into the mountains of the states of Mexico and Michoacán.

That’s where my body stopped fighting the air. The temperatures were cooler, the nights were soft (with fireflies!), and when I finally got to experience a summer here: cool, green, full of rainy nights, it was spectacular. And It still is.

The lesson wasn’t that the Pacific coast was bad. It was and is beautiful. It just wasn’t for me to live in. Not full time. My body needed elevation and rain and cool nights. I didn’t know that about myself until I’d tested it in real conditions, on real Tuesdays, you might say.

Looking back, I realized a lot of these mistakes came from asking the wrong questions before I moved.

The Mower

Another mistake I made has to do with my new riding lawn mower! Ta Da!

Recently, I finally worked up the courage to buy a riding mower. If you’ve watched my channel for a while, you may know that spending that kind of money doesn’t come naturally to me. I can talk myself out of a purchase six different ways before breakfast. But with an acre and a half of grass, it was time. Time to put my money where my mouth was.

A neighbor’s gardener, Oscar, offered to help me navigate the purchase. He took me to a local shop owned by a friend of his. After shopping around a bit in Morelia, I decided I’d rather have a relationship with a local shop than save a little money somewhere else. If something broke, I wanted someone nearby who knew the machine and could get parts. So I put down a substantial deposit, and they ordered the mower.

About two hours later, Oscar texted me a picture.

It wasn’t the mower I’d ordered. It was a lesser brand.

I politely replied that I had agreed to buy a Troy-Bilt, not the other model in the picture. After a little back and forth, Oscar agreed. 

But by then something had happened that surprised me a little. I got suspicious.

There’s a stereotype in Mexico that foreign residents think everyone is trying to rip them off. I’d always rolled my eyes at that. And then suddenly… there I was, wondering if I’d just become exactly that person.

A friend suggested I ask my new gardener, Javier, if he knew the shop. He did. In fact, he was kind enough to stop by and ask what they had ordered for me. He even sent me a photograph of the paperwork.

Unfortunately, the paperwork was incomplete and all I could really make out was that it had a 500cc engine. It didn’t reassure me as much as I’d hoped.

When the shop wanted me to pay the balance before they delivered the mower, I declined, politely. I wanted to see it first, make sure it was new and the correct model, and hear it run before I handed over the rest of the money. My understanding was that once I paid for it, whatever showed up at my house was probably mine forever. There wasn’t going to be a nice return policy or someone asking if I’d like to exchange it, or my money back.

So we met at the shop.

And the mower was exactly what I’d ordered. Héctor, the shop owner, looked a little puzzled when I asked him to put gasoline in it and start it up right there in his little shop, but he did. Everything looked perfect, and I felt relieved. A brand new mower!

Then Héctor handed me the receipt.

The model number and serial number didn’t match the mower sitting in front of me.

I just looked at him and thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He smiled and rewrote the receipt with the correct numbers, delivered the mower to my house, showed me how to use it, and everything has been fine ever since.

So, I had become the suspicious foreigner, and they had become the shop that accidentally gave me a few good reasons to be suspicious.

We had both lived up to the stereotypes.

I also felt a little proud of myself.

Not because I’d caught someone trying to cheat me. I don’t think that’s what happened at all. I was proud because I’d asked questions. I get a little shy about these things sometimes. But I’d insisted on seeing what I was buying before paying for it. I’d advocated for myself, politely but firmly, in a language that still wasn’t comfortable for me.

But what I took away from that experience wasn’t cynicism, it was confidence. I could ask questions and it didn’t offend anyone. In fact, once everything was sorted out, we all left happy.

Ok, I got a little paranoid but they weren’t trying to cheat me. But it wasn’t really a mistake, it was more about expectations and a clash of different cultures doing business in different ways.

Back in the States we have that expression, “You had one job…” Like “couldn’t you get it right?” 

We tend to condemn mistakes and assume the worst. Here I’ve found people often react differently. Mistakes happen. You fix them and move on. It’s less dramatic than I was used to.

Like I said, there’s not always a guarantee or a warranty or a return policy here. So instead of expecting the system to protect me, I’ve learned to ask questions, pay attention, and take responsibility for the decisions that are mine to make.

The Move is Not the Finish Line

Those are some of the funny mistakes and misunderstandings I’ve made here. 

But there’s another mistake I think a lot of people make when they’re planning a big change. It’s harder to see, because it doesn’t look like a mistake at the time. It looks like progress.

The mistake is thinking the move is the finish line.

For me, getting here was the hard part. The months of wondering if I could. Getting laid off. The packing, the selling, the saying goodbye. The drive south with two dogs and everything I owned. 

But By the time I crossed the border, I was so relieved to be done with nursing, done with that life, that even the hardest parts of getting here didn’t feel hard. The yellow strap holding my trunk closed when I had a car malfunction. The long days of driving alone. None of it scared me the way it could have. I was too relieved.

What I didn’t expect was that the real change would start after I arrived. And that it would be, of all things, a joy.

For the first time in decades, I had time and I had quiet. I had room to ask questions I’d been too tired and too busy to ask for most of my adult life. Who am I when I’m not a nurse? Who am I when nobody is depending on me to be the responsible one? Who am I when no one is looking?

I got to find out. Slowly and on my own schedule. With a hummingbird at the edge of the spray from the hose, and dogs at my feet, and time, finally, to think, to write, and to just be.

I didn’t know that part was coming. I’d been so focused on getting out that I hadn’t really considered what would happen on the other side. And I got lucky; the other side turned out to be the best part. 

But it could have gone differently. If I’d moved somewhere that didn’t suit me, if I’d landed in a place that drained me instead of giving me room and energy, the inner work of becoming someone new might never have happened. I might have just traded one kind of exhaustion for another.

That’s what I want to say to anyone who’s thinking about a big change. The move itself isn’t the answer. The place you choose has to be one that gives you room to become whoever you’re becoming. Otherwise you’ve just moved your old life to a new address.

That’s actually why I created the Relocation Clarity Framework. It’s a structured way to think through one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make. Not just where to live, but what kind of life you’re actually trying to build.

If you’re in that stage of your own journey, I’ll leave a link below.

But as a way to ask the deeper questions before you go: what you’re actually trying to change, and whether a place can give you the room to do it. So that if you do make the leap, you land somewhere that lets the rest of the story unfold. And the real you to come out.

The move is not the finish line. It’s the start of something. And the better your landing place fits you, the more that something gets to be.

I want to end with something I think about often.

I made all the mistakes I just told you about, and more. I prepared badly in ways I didn’t even know to prepare for. I should have struggled here a lot more than I actually did.

But early on, in a little tienda in Melaque, there was an old woman behind the counter shelling peas. She wasn’t your typical abuelita. She had braided hair, silver at the roots and black at the ends, and a face you didn’t argue with. She looked fierce. 

She looked up when I told her I’d come alone with my dogs. She called me hija. She gave me a tamarindo candy and told me to be careful with the men. Siempre pregunta. Siempre mira. Pero no pares. Always ask. Always look. But don’t stop.

I think about her often. I didn’t think about it at the time, but she was the first person who really made me feel cared for here. Just a small kindness, freely given by a stranger.

I got lucky. Mexico was generous with me in so many ways. 

That, it turns out, is what I’d been looking for. I just hadn’t known what to call it.

Looking back, I don’t regret any of these mistakes. They were the price of becoming someone who actually lives here instead of someone who was just visiting.

That’s the thing about starting over. You don’t just move to a new country.

Eventually, if you stay long enough, the country moves into you.