Morning in Mexico – Oaxaca, Mexico

Morning in Mexico
Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

We’ve rented a yellow and blue bungalow in the ramshackle garden of a once grand casa in the hills above Oaxaca. It’s a myth that mornings in Mexico are a gentle, demure, sensual sort of blooming. Mornings in Mexico are a clattering, work-a-day, brash inevitability. For one thing, they start in the middle of the night. In that cool, damp, loosened-tie kind of hour, all rumpled and squashed like a discarded corsage. When might is trailin’ home with its dinner jacket over its shoulder, it gets barreled over by morning.

This morning, for instance, it is still dark, but it smells like dawn, and across the ravine, a rooster crows. Our neighbor’s rooster, fashionably late, swaggers like Sinatra into his farmyard and begins tuning up for the duel. Under an inky blue sky, on top of his woodpile, he belts it out, flapping and cockadoodledooing up on his tiptoes, and far away he’s answered by all the other roosters blustering on top of their woodpiles and fifty gallon drums in all the other farmyards up and down the dry valley.

Roosters, evidently, are the cue that sets the planets spinning, since, at this very moment (and, weirdly, it happens like this every morning), the earth tips, the hills warm, the air swirls, and wind is hustled up, which, in the great, domino scheme of things, shoves the towering palm above our little house which sways like a ship and makes a wonderful, oceany shooshing roar and we roll over, stuff our heads under the pillows, and stretch our feet.

The palm above our house is home and teetering hearth to a family of crotchety grackles who wake up with bitter and resentful squawks, which wakes up the pleasanter dove brood in the pomegranate trees at the bottom of the garden, who make sleepy, gooey sounds. Skeletal Mexican cats trail home over the tiles on our roof and slink along the top of the garden wall, which is festively imbedded with twinkly green and blue shards of smashed Sprite bottles. Something we think is a raccoon waddles across the porch and stops to snuffle the gap under the bedroom door. That wakes us up.

Farmers driving oxen to graze in the hills clatter over the cobbles beyond the gate. Burros hornk and scream and complain like someone is sawing their heads off. Next door, at the carpenter’s house, his wife has lit a fire. In the smoke we can smell hot tortillas and beans and chocolate. The dogs are going crazy for breakfast. The sinewy farmer on the other side of the garden, who my easygoing husband yelled at in the street yesterday for beating his dog bloody, is pumping water. We scowl. His cow lows plaintively to be milked. You can smell her too, all straw and manure and worry. It’s time to get up and make coffee. We sit on the porch and eat sliced mangoes and hot tortillas and watch the hills change under the sky, which is by now the color of baby aspirin and pearly flakes of cloud are marching up into the hills with the oxen.

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