March 15, 2022
The central Mexican spring is a strange thing. We get a little rain in January, virtually none in February, and zero in March. Clothing left on the line overnight is dry by morning, the humidity is so low. Yet suddenly, the flowering trees, like the jacarandas, are out in bloom, and in some places we walk over a carpet of violet flowers that have dropped from the branches.
Technically, this is winter, which makes it even stranger. The weather is hot, but foliage has not emerged on most trees. The result is that they look like wintry trees, bleak and leafless, except for the ones that are in flower. There must be a mechanism whereby the flowering ones either store moisture, or tap into it deep underground, but I don’t know the botany well enough to explain it. By late May or early June, we’ll have rain again, and the leaves will be out. Meanwhile, we’re in this thirst-making time, where dehydration is more of a risk than wind-chill will ever be.
The people I run into at the coffee shop all make some reference to the fighting in the winter weather thousands of miles away, but it’s almost as if it’s in poor taste to say much. Mexico ended WW2 technically at war with Germany, but the Revolution aside, it largely avoided warfare in the 20th Century. In our furtive conversations over coffee we sometimes ponder how safe we’d be if things get really bad in Ukraine, but the answer is always that we’re probably safe as houses, unless someone uses a nuke and there’s fallout. Mexico’s President, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, recently declined to join sanctions against Russia, saying he would welcome Russian tourists. The likelihood of any Aeroflot flights coming here right now is close to zero but AMLO is not noted for addressing difficult topics head-on.
So, we complain about the heat, admire the jacarandas that have finally put on a first-rate display, and congratulate ourselves for having chosen to live here. Or be born here, as the case may be.
Like I said, the central Mexican spring is a strange thing. We waited through the pandemic, we wait through the sunlit afternoons, and with everyone else, we wait for something we prefer not to mention, in case it actually happens.
Mexed Messages 