2 resolutions : February 2023

Tim with one of the beautiful everyday sunsets of Puerto.

We are actually in Puerto Escondido, which I will write about in a future blog, but although I have been writing and drawing full time in my diary, I have not kept to my original desire to blog once a week. Oh well, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a problem to worry about.

Dancing tree-creatures

But I fell in love with the trees of Mexico City and have wanted to give them their due, and also, beds are really important to our lives, and there have been so many since we left our home in October.

Tim and I have had a few lovely beds through our nearly 39 years together. In South Africa, our bed was a simple second-hand wooden frame double bed. This was the bed where all the children came to climb in next to Tim {definitely not to me!} to tell him their nightmares and be comforted and put back in their own beds after they were calmed.

To explain why they didn't call their mother, the usual comforter in the night: I coerced the entire family to call Tim instead, because sleep becomes your dearest wish after becoming a mother, you will in fact trade almost anything for it at times. I justify this cruelty towards my children for these reasons: after firstly growing the babies in my body, next birthing them, and then breast-feeding them for literally years {6 years, two of the babies were twins and so should probably count double, so 8 years really} of days and sleepless nights, I felt by the time the children were weaned, I deserved to sleep deeply enough to dream again.

Our old bedroom with our lovely bed.

When we arrived in America (with hardly any money for luxuries like beds) we slept on a blow-up mattress for about a year. That was not a lovely bed, because when they get old (their life span was just a few months back then), they slowly and maliciously let the air seep out during the night so that you wake up with sore hips and grumpy feelings from a night spent in effect sleeping on the floor.

Our new friends Mary and Jim then upgraded their bed and donated their old one to us, which was a lovely stately tall bed. Years later, in 2016, we finally bought our very first brand-new bed. It is the most beautiful wooden bed with a headboard and a footboard, built for a queen! It is at present waiting quietly for us in our storage unit, and we miss it terribly.

We have slept in 19 beds since selling and leaving our home in October 2022! Human beings spend so much of our lives in bed, and strangely enough we are unconscious for much of that time. But our beds are refuges when we are sick or hurt. They are havens, where we experience the ecstasy of desire and the bliss of sleep and dreams. They are where we reconstitute our relationships, where sleep mends our own physical beings, rebuilding our bones and muscles, and our souls.

Cotton sheets in Mexico City

Some of these 19 beds have been delightful, with clean white cotton sheets (the best), while others have been lumpy, or have had the worst pillows in the world, or have had those awful polyester sheets, which quite frankly shouldn't be allowed to exist.

I have learned (am still mastering the art) to appreciate what is good about each place we have stayed in, and to know that fairly soon, there will be another to get used to for a brief moment in time. And so maybe an accommodation has those aforementioned awful sheets, or the pillows seem to have been stuffed with balls of dough, or there is no kettle, (because there are countries where people don't like tea). Maybe there is no grater, or metal cutlery, or even china crockery, or a decent saucepan. Sometimes the shower only trickles out enough hot water for one person a day.

Painting on my "table" in Puerto Escondido

You find instead that the place is gratifying in other ways, like the fact that it has space to unpack your art materials and leave them out, or that there is a large friendly fridge, or a small balcony which acts as an extra room in a cramped studio apartment, or a wonderful enormous inviting bed.

These experiences are teaching me how to make do, with less, with what we have, to change the picture in my head, (something I have always exhorted my children and grandchildren to do). Of course there are still some days where a lot of expletives float around in my vicinity.

So on we go, next Friday, to our 20th bed, in CDMX (Mexico City), again. (Also, beds are often made of wood, so they were once trees, so we sleep, like our ancient ape ancestors, held by trees.)

In CDMX I will see all my old familiars again. The trees I loved and greeted every day. (Not EVERY tree, I'm not crazy!😀 But yes, many.)

The house made of trees

This building is on the way between Nick's place and ours, so although I tried to explore a different way every day, I would often choose this street so that I could spend some time gazing up from the shade of these glorious beings. Some (on the side) are jacarandas, of which there are so many in CDMX (Mexico City) and there are multitudes of other intimate trees that remind me of my own country, South Africa.

The toes are growing too long for the shoes!

If you ever go to CDMX, you will be astonished at the plant life there. There is greenery everywhere, and people taking care of it all, growing plants on rooves, on sidewalks, and watering old trees and clearing lovingly around their roots.

There are even trees in the puddles!

Builders will often conserve a tree and work around it to build a new edifice. It is common to see an entire site where the old building has been razed to the ground but the big old trees are still standing, healthy and strong and unfazed, patiently awaiting their new neighbors. (Whereas in my experience in the US, a new building site will just employ one of those terrible, awful truck inventions which demolishes an ancient 10m high tree, with all its ringed history of nests and creatures, of hiding places for chickadees' seeds, into nothing but a pile of lifeless wood-chips remaining, in just a few minutes, to be laid down later to actually stop things from growing!)

Lines and dapples

Even though the walk to Nick's apartment is only about 10 minutes, it usually took me about half an hour because of stopping to express my adoration, enchanted every day by the tree beauties.