Kelly and I will be flying to Denver next week, and staying in Colorado for ten weeks before flying back. This is the longest we will have been out of Mexico since we moved here three and a half years ago.
But I’m setting up a whole bunch of articles that will automatically appear, every Friday. A friend of mine has written two about being a gay foreigner in Mexico, and she’s also written one about how surprisingly safe she and her partner felt as tourists in Mexico City. Intrepid travelers, they were in Southeast Asia last year, and she’s written another about Mexico vs. Thailand as places to live. I have written several articles myself, and expect to write about my impressions of the US while I am there.
Leaving a Home in Mexico
It’s not a simple thing to leave your home here — specially if you have a yard, a garden, a pool, pets, or security concerns. We have all five!
Yard, garden, and pool: the fact that we will be gone during the rainy season will make it easier on our pool guy and gardener, Roberto. Luckily he lives not far away, as he may need to check in here more frequently than he does normally. He has a large family so they can enjoy all the veggies in season!
Pets: A Canadian friend of ours will be living in the house, sleeping here every night. She knows the dogs already. Our cats are quite timid with strangers but I’m sure they will warm up to her. I will show her the cat toys! When she does go out for a while, the dogs will be in their usual spots, though at first they will probably hang out by the front gate for a few days. That’s what we’ve been told they do when we leave… oooh, this is the hardest part!
Security: I’ve written in the past that we have had a few incidents in our yard, though happily never in our house. We raised our one low wall and put sharp glass on it some time ago, we’ve beefed up the front gate, and we now have two good guard dogs — one makes up for being medium sized by being a darn good barker (sometimes too much!) and the other is a Rottweiler. Our neighborhood is generally pretty quiet, and we have quite a few friends nearby, both Mexican and foreign. So that’s handled as well as can be.
Spending Time in the U.S.
This should be interesting. It’s one thing to read the news about life up north and it will be quite another to see if our friends have been affected, and if so, how. We look forward to getting our own sense of things in a way that we can’t do from here. Most of the time, we will be based in a little place we have already rented, in the small town in Colorado where we lived for ten years before coming here.
We are not biological grandparents, but our little ahijada — goddaughter — lives there. Now three and a half, she and her younger sister were adopted here. They’ve been gone for over a year and we have sorely missed them. We expect to spend a lot of time with them. I doubt the 20-month-old will really recognize us immediately, but I lugged her around a lot in her first months, so my feel and voice may somehow ring a bell…
I will be glad to be in the US for a while, and to get a break from living in this really very different society. It does take attention!
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