Waking up in San Miguel Allende
- maryrmaroney
- Nov 5, 2015
- 2 min read
Waking up here is waking up to happiness. Fruit trees drape their branches over my second-storey balconette in a daily invitation to pick fresh oranges or pomegranates for breakfast. A homemade mix of ridiculous mariachi music, Disney songs, and Shania Twain circa 1997 plays from a nearby renovation site. The day is bursting with the promise of art openings, theatre events, botanical gardens and cathedrals resplendent in the sun.
Of course, there are the daily incidents with the mother of the woman who owns the house I’m renting a room in. Eighty-six years old and very much in the clutches of dementia, she routinely bursts into my room to hop on one foot while shouting in Italian, then sticks out her tongue with a loud noise and scuttles back out again. She’s tiny and shriveled and wears an endearing beret. I often see her trying to get out of the house or shouting at the neighbors. It’s essentially an ongoing scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
My first days here were in the midst of the Day of the Dead festival. The cobblestoned town centre was strung with paper flags and flower garlands, every street lined with candlelit shrines loaded with bottles of booze and carefully prepared dishes to coax out the souls of lost loved ones. Deathly characters roamed the streets in velvet dresses and lacy parasols, faces painted white and black and hair adorned with flower crowns. For a festival centred around death, the celebrations were an explosion of colour and life. At night, the Old Town was lit up and paper streamers fluttered from the tops of churches. Giant papier mache characters on stilts wobbled through the costumed crowd; wrinkled Mexican ladies sold crowns made of fresh or dried flowers. Ghostly Catrinas and their skeleton-faced male companions danced in the main square, whirling and swishing their skirts between the shrines while the cathedral bells rang out the night. I was entranced, spell-bound, intoxicated.
Life has since calmed down, but it is in no way less. I find myself taking enormous pleasure in tiny things that remind me I’m somewhere new. Lighting the stove with a match. Walking to the grungy store on the corner to buy eggs from a man who takes them one by one from a crate and hands them to me loose in a plastic bag. Passing tortillarias or sidewalk tables strewn with tamarind candies on my walk into town. (Avoid the tamarind candies. Their claims of “RICO! RICO!” are pure lies.)
My day today is deliciously open. I’ll probably walk down to the cheap pozole place for lunch, then try to find the Instituto Allende where mom and dad spent their art student days. I might do some sketching around the historic part of town, though every time I’ve done so I’ve drawn an unprecedented crowd of onlookers, mostly children whose black-haired heads push in so close they block my view of my sketchbook.
”¡Mamá! ¡Mira! Es un profesional!!”
I suspect the day will end, as most have so far, with a rooftop Corona while the desert sunset bathes this beautiful town in a wash of orange, illuminating the cathedral I so love against steel blue clouds for a suspended moment before sinking below the mountains.
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