PUERTO MORELOS CIRCA SUMMER 2010

It was like a little village of abodes, and when you looked out the Southern pelicans, black against the sky and the overcast clouds, came across the mornings look around. Pink and orange stucco sat down smartly into thick wild grasses that the wind carried over and made to dance to a song. Beyond in back was the Mexican jungle and sometimes a large bug would

fly out and land atop a table and we would flick it off. At that time, in that month, the storms had turned up the bottom of the ocean and nothing could really be seen but a sort of opaque and thick green darkness of water. Even the whitecaps looked off-white and vexatious. All this hid the jellyfish, of which there were thousands. Any soul going in got stung, and I received my painful initiation right off. But not everything is a bad omen, or to be read into, - though many things can be and should be, sometimes a jellyfish is just a jellyfish. The rest of the time we read For Whom the Bell Tolls, ate nutritious and interesting foods, and talked to the others. More than half the days were actually bright, sun kissed, picaresque. Most of the storms were in the night and carried over in the early morning but then dissipated. The pool was quiet and calm, clean and tranquil. At the evenings a wonderful coffee shop that was half indoors and half out seemed to light up just right, so perfectly, from the lights below verdant palm trees housed atop terrene trunks. Parapets and interesting walkways made from interlocking bricks everywhere. And then the sound of the sea mingled with conversations, tinkling glasses. The whole marvelous picture and scene of southern sound, sight, - the glass, the walls, the tree lines, - the yellow lights and the rest. Even the night storms when they came in had their own rough-hewn beauty and above all a prowess and individuality, a confidence. A little anole lizard, happy enough, kept me company many hours on the balcony. He sat under an outdoor light on the orange wall. He looked at me and the environs and I looked at the book and waited for the morning pelicans to silhouette themselves against the still ominous sky.



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