Last blog from Bernal, for now

We're packing up, cleaning house, and all the rest of it. Hoping that if it rains, our clothes on the line get dry first. Tomorrow early, we are heading back to the US, via Zacatecas and north to Chihuahua. There's a hot springs we may check out, unless the weather is so hot that we can't bear the thought of hot water. So we'll be in Mexico a few more days. We have a few acres outside of Deming, NM, just half an hour from the border, and we plan to camp there a night or two and reflect on things. We may set the internet satellite up there, before visiting family en route to our Colorado home.

I woke up this morning feeling happy and sad all mixed up together. I'm so grateful that we came back to Bernal, which we weren't going to do till we happened to run into Jay and Lucy, who lent us their house here. I'm still astonished that we found a livable house for $108 US/ a month and that we have turned into something very homey. (The kitchen awaits our return to become really good.) I'm excited about the future in a way that I wonder how many 62-year-olds are. Bernal is now a place I feel at home in, and I'm glad that we'll be coming back here. I've already got a plan to do photo-essays on different people around the town for this blog and possibly for a book later.

It's kind of amazing to me how much I have grown personally too. Fear has less of a grip on my subconscious than it did. I haven't needed tranqulizers in traffic in months. (I will have them with me as we head north, just in case.)

Beyond that, there is something about stretching beyond comfort zones that I can highly recommend. For some reason, I really had a bee in my bonnet last fall to go somewhere foreign for the winter. We researched Panama, Nicaragua, and other places before deciding that we'd come back to Mexico this time. We really like the ease of access between Mexico and the US, as well as the tremendous diversity within this one large country. There are things I don't care for here, sure, but there is so much love in people here. That's probably what I like best of all in Mexico.