I spent the day cleaning. This was my first day alone in the house. This house, this beautiful, colorful house located on the coast in Mexico, was what I had longed for, for decades.  I wanted to make it feel like it was mine. I wanted to cleanse it of everything that I could that, for me, was not aesthetically pleasing. I wanted to possess it. It would become my safe haven. I, within moments of waking on my first day alone in the house, was overwhelmed with a profound sense of being really alone.

With a year’s lease,  I had plenty of time to explore the city, the beaches and the neighborhood. There was plenty of food in the house, I still needed to get completely unpacked and I needed to listen. I needed to hear what was going on in my head. There was no need to go outside at the moment.  This time,  this time in Mexico,  I was thinking,  just might be the time to still my heart and thoughts enough to know what was going on inside.

Besides, cleaning, for me, is cathartic. While I was in school,  it was also a way to procrastinate against the inevitable,  generally a paper that I needed to write or needing to study for a test. Nothing called to me so urgently as a dirty oven or toilet as an impending deadline loomed. It seemed, oddly enough, that cleaning took precedent over any scholastic endeavor. But here, at this time, I would not and could not avoid the inevitable. I was going nowhere. I know not a single soul in this country, so my only company would be my own voice.

I, probably like everyone else,  have a steady stream of mostly gibberish going on in my head. When I really listen,  I might be counting the stairs as I climb up to bed,  I might just as likely be going over and over a vision of an embarrassing encounter with a colleague where I should have said this and not that, or promising myself as I have for the last twenty years that tomorrow I will eat less sugar and exercise more, I forgot to get this or that at the store, what time does swimming start on Wednesday… it goes on and on in this way.  You get my drift. But now, I wanted to slow that stream of nonsense so that I could hear perhaps what’s rolling down under the deeper water. There has to be more.  I know there is more because sometimes I can hear it and to say the least,  it scares me.

I’ve had a colorful, interesting and very full life: I was married for twenty seven years, had children, divorced, traveled, had lovers, spent years becoming educated, had a career I loved and am now retired and living in Mexico. I’ve taken huge risks, some which were calculated and some which were not. My decision making process has always been walking through the next open door. This has mostly served me well. But has it really? This is the question that is rising to the surface.  Has it really? Maybe I wasn’t just cleaning house.   Maybe I was doing some deep cleaning of a different sort. So,  I hauled out bags full of garbage,  swept down walls, cleaned windows,  oiled furniture, cleaned out the refrigerator,  washed floors… and I stood on the balconies and looked down at my neighborhood.

I stared out at Banderas Bay. Dogs were barking, clean laundry was flapping from nearly every rooftop, Banda music was blaring and the sun was going down,  setting the sky on fire.

After a full day, I smelled like a pig. I was hot and sweating and I wasn’t near to being done. But it was time to stop and give myself a rest. I showered, ate and settled onto the couch. But what was to come,  I could not have dreamed up in a nightmare.

I had been picking on the delicious roast beef and tuna all day that Rebecca had cooked. I wasn’t hungry but as usual,  I wanted something sweet.  I was bushed and thought I’d watch a movie before going to bed.  I rummaged around in the refrigerator remembering that Rebecca and I had been snacking on some really good ginger,  salted peanuts and dark chocolate candy that a friend had made for her.  If I was in luck,  I thought,  she won’t have taken them. Low and behold,  I found in the freezer some chocolates.  Yes! There were two big chunks and I decided to eat it all.  It was perfect.  Though they weren’t the same,  they were still yummy.  I started the movie and settled back to relax for the first time all day.

Between half an hour and forty five minutes, I started to feel sleepy and really thirsty. I got up to get some water and my heart was beating a little too hard,  I felt shaky and weak all over.  I made my way upstairs thinking I should lie down.  I had to hold on to the walls. By the time I got upstairs,  I was afraid that I was having a heart attack or a stroke. I was drinking glass after glass of water but could not quench my thirst. I started to get very scared. At one point I thought I might be having a mental breakdown.

And then my mind awoke as if from a deep sleep. I sensed my situation in bright and living color. I am 66 years old, going on 67. I don’t know anybody.  I could die here in this house and nobody would know for days, probably. I could fall down the stairs,  I could have a heart attack or stroke. I have fucking 3rd stage osteo-arthritis in both knees and I have to climb a spiral staircase to the roof to do laundry.  I have to catch the bus to go anywhere and the streets are called cobblestone but are really large river rock to walk over.  The buses don’t kneel,  the stairs to get in are tall, narrow and uneven.  To walk means navigating the streets and climbing up curbs that are broken and of every height from toe to knee.

My predicament flew in my face. It began to dawn on me that my dream of retiring to Mexico was based on a dream of 21 years ago.  My perceptions of me in the world had changed drastically in that time.  I am still healthy and get along fine regardless of a nearly useless right arm,  aging knees and the residues of surviving cancer and chemo therapy 10 years ago.

My mind began to reel with these realizations and I woke to the fact that there is a lot to be said for being around people who know you and love you and care about you. Being near people who you care about might be one of the most important things in life and that being planted and staying where your established roots are is to be really known.

As I was contemplating all of this,  I was looking at the horizon and and at all of the big hotels built along the beach. I looked at the millions of lights and thought about the tens of thousands of workers it takes to keep this vacation paradise working, most of whom make little money.  And what about the foreign investors who exploit sand, sun and surf and make billions of dollars from the billions of tourists who come to be treated to food,  lodging,  adventure and relaxation. The culture and history of this country and any other tourist destination is usurped as show,  as entertainment. The people are reminded at every turn to, “Be nice. Our lives depend on tourism”.

And here I was.  I had plopped my big American ass right down in the middle of a Mexican neighborhood, a neighborhood where generations of families have lived.  They cannot simply choose to drive north and relocate in the United States, we don’t let them. But I can,  for less than $300.00 USD, move in next door to them and expect them to be my friends. I began to understand their looks and questions. “Why did you move here?  How long are you staying?”

I don’t have to work.  I come and go as I please. It’s an unfair,  unjust and unbalanced system. I am a part of this exploitation,  as are all ex-pats around the world,  living on foreign dollars (at least to begin with)  and benefiting in that relationship. Cheap rent, food, healthcare, etc.

Oh, my god! What had I done? Had I really thought any of this though?  Like so many of my decisions,  this decision had been a bad one, maybe the worse decision of my life and based on thin air. I walked through the next open door. Now what? The door was not so easy to open from the other side.

I have a year’s lease.  I’ve given up my house in Portland,  I’ve put all I own into storage. How do I get out of this mess I’ve made for myself? At that moment, if I had had the strength, I probably would have started packing; I wanted to leave right then. I was embarrassed by my privilege.

I tried to call Hannah thinking I should let her know that I might be dying. She couldn’t be reached, so I called Dhillon.  As they say, any port in a storm. This is never a good idea,  but I thought he should know that I was having a crises,  an episode. All he could say was, “I told you so.” But his response was based not on what I was telling him, but based on his need for my assistance. It meant nothing. And at this moment was not going to save me as I felt myself slipping into darkness.

I was shaking, I could barely walk, I couldn’t sleep. I would wake up thinking someone was talking to me or touching me and I knew without doubt that I needed to go home. This is not my culture, these are not my people, and no matter how much time I have spent here, or how well I speak their language or how many years I spent studying their history, I would always be a foreigner, a visitor.

Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep. I cleaned the house for another week, though I continued to feel shaky and weak for many days, I knew that I would do everything I could to go home. But how?

Postscript: For two days I struggled to figure out what had happened to me. After wracking my brain, I realized that it was the magic chocolate. I would not have freaked if I had been aware nor would I have eaten so much. I am accustomed to tripping hard but I would have known what was coming. Knowing this does not negate what I learned on this mystical night. I am forever changed and grateful for the revelation.

Of course, I was homesick. And, on top of that, I had not ever felt like I knew for sure that moving to Mexico was the right thing to do nor was it the right time to do it. It is perfectly natural to miss friends and family and I know I’m not the first person to move to a foreign country and wonder what the hell I had done.

Rebecca had asked me to come early so that she could personally hand off the keys, talk to me about the house and utilities and so we had some time to get to know one another a little. She was going to leave the day after I arrived, which would have made it the 28th of April. Hannah, and at least Nori, was going to come with me, spend a couple of weeks, help me get settled and have some time to enjoy the beach. With Rebecca leaving, that would have been perfect. She had packed up some of her belongings that were still in the house and they were stored in the second floor bedroom, named the Frida Kahlo room. The next day, Hannah and Enora would have the room.

Rebecca had an arrangement with the previous tenant to stay in the house during high season. She has a business selling these amazing dolls that she and women in prison make by hand. Now, the Rebecca Roth story is a long story and I will tell it, but not now, but be assured, you will be mad, sad and shaken by it. The markets are very active here during the fall through spring. I had already discussed with her that I expected visitors during the high season and my agreement with her as a tenant was not to share the house with her, so she would not be staying here. She would look for other lodgings  when she came back. For now, she was moving to a small town near Guadalajara where she spends the summers.

When I arrived, Rebecca informed me that she wouldn’t be leaving until Friday. This wasn’t a bad revelation since Hannah had decided that it would be just too expensive to come, especially now that her expenses for the house would be tripling since she would have no roommates to share them. I was feeling very bad about her predicament but I also thought that she, within two months, would have affordable housing for her and the kids. I made arrangements to pay half the rent on the house for two months so that she could afford to stay there for at least that long. I felt some relief but this was weighing heavy on my heart and mind.

So, Rebecca and I spent the days changing the electricity into my name, going to Costco and to Mega, a Fred Myer type store and running errands as she tied up loose ends. I spent $60.00 at Mega buying things for the kitchen and about $276.00 at Costco on gin and tonic, vodka, wine, and three shade sails for the roof, toilet paper, laundry soap, a nice roast of beef and such. We were hoping that the shade sails would help to keep the house cooler and make the roof a cool hangout. That was a lot more than I had planned to spend, but it wasn’t more than I had brought with me. I wanted to be comfortable and feel at home and there’s something about having some liquor around to share that did that.

Rebecca cooked the beef and the tuna. She is a fabulous cook and knew just what to do to make special meals with not much work . We ate only at home and had thinly sliced rare roast to eat with horseradish and tuna medallions to eat with salad and whatever for the days before she left. Finally, on Thursday, knowing that she was leaving, she started to gather things out of the kitchen to put into bags. Rebecca is an extraordinary woman. I felt immediately like I was with a sister. I came to love her in these short days together. Rebecca read to me from her published anthology of poems. We watched Gravity, we talked and we talked and I learned more of her incredible story. My life was enriched by spending time with her.

I was grateful that Rebecca was not leaving until Friday. I wanted to know more about her and what about her journey made her so tough. Her son, with his Mexican girlfriend and her two sons were coming to pack up two cars and drive the six hours to Lake Chapala with no AC, just as the weather was beginning to heat up. Thursday, as I said, she started to move things out of the kitchen in earnest and to actually put things in garbage bags that were, to my eye, in total chaos in the bedroom. To my relief, she was leaving more in the kitchen than I thought and there was no need for me to fully furnish it.

By this point, I was getting tired of just sitting around, so I decided to clean. The kitchen was not bad but not good either. Rebecca had a cleaning woman, Lupe, but I knew once I got into the shelves and counters and floors that I would not be engaging Lupe as my cleaning woman. I found a lot that Rebecca needed to pack and I pulled everything out of the shelves and tore that place apart. After a full day of cleaning, I was finally satisfied. There are enough cleaning supplies in the house for a couple of years.

After a lovely dinner and more conversation, I went to bed, knowing that Rebecca would be leaving the next morning and the house would be mine and I would be on my own in this entirely Mexican neighborhood in a city I had never wanted to move to in the first place.

I was still on Portland time. I didn’t wake until after 9:30 Friday morning. I came downstairs and the living room was not navigable. Everything that Rebecca was taking was on the floor. Her son was late and it was going to be a wonder: #1 if everything would fit into two cars with 5 people and their luggage; #2 that they would actually be able to get out of here before noon. Rebecca wanted to leave in the early morning. It wasn’t going to happen. She was cooking potatoes and beef to feed the family while she and her son bickered about how to pack the cars. I curled up in the corner of the couch to stay out of their way. I was hungry but I wasn’t going to try to get to the kitchen… not even for coffee.

Miracles do happen. They filled the cars to their over-full capacity. Everyone but the drivers were sitting on something with their feet propped straight out. While Rebecca and her son fought about where the antifreeze and extra oil would fit, the two old Chihuahuas, Obi Juan and Don Juan, looked about furtively from their perches. I wondered how everyone, including these cars would fare on the long, hot drive.

I stood on the sidewalk knowing that I would miss Rebecca and the dogs (though they pooped and peed all over my bedroom). As they started the engines, a woman walked by saying “Red Alert”. I had no idea what this meant. But later, I found out that while we were busy, members of the New Generation drug cartel were busy both in Vallarta and Guadalajara, burning gas stations, breaking into banks and setting cars on fire as we spoke. People were killed but no tourists or locals, just the military, police and members of the gang.

Off they went, leaving me standing there to go into the house on my own. It was hot; I was sweating as I had been since I stepped off the plane at PVR and as I have been since. I knew nothing about anything, not how to catch the bus, get what I needed nor how to make myself happy and content, I do know Spanish, thank goodness. Little did I know that Vallarta was on fire.

From here, things got strange and very fast.

I am in Mexico and have been here longer than I thought I would be before I posted something in this blog. It was my intention to post daily and to document my first year in Puerto Vallarta. Now, sadly and yet happily, I will return to Portland after two and a half months. The experience to date has been intense.

I had no idea how fragile I was when I left Portland. Sure, I had my misgivings. I mostly wanted to get away from our roommate; I felt frustrated. Perhaps it was me, perhaps we were not meant to inhabit the same space. I won’t go into it here since it is a very private affair, but I was either going to find my own place or move to Mexico.

It had been my dream for decades to retire in Mexico. After some time living/studying here in the 90’s, I had fallen in love with the tropical climate along the Pacific coast. I liked what I knew of the history of Mexico and the culture and had found the people friendly. I had spent a lot of time traveling with the curator of the Museum of Art, Margarite Magdelena. She had taken me to parts of Mexico that I never would have been able to know without an in-depth knowledge of her country. That story has been told and yet to be written. I will however write those experiences later.

So my dream to retire here was based on experiences I had some 21 years in the past. Sure, I had continued to visit Mexico alone and with family and friends throughout the ensuing years as I worked to get my graduate degree in History and Folklore and Mythology. Then as I pursued my career as the Archivist/Assistant professor in the History Of Medicine at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, I continued to enjoy trips to Mexico. When I decided to retire at 66 years old, my answers to the inquiries of others about what I would do when I was no longer working was that I would retire in Mexico.

I didn’t know that as I packed up, our roommate was really going to move, leaving Hannah to pay the rent on an enormous house. After two years of him threatening to move, he actually did, as I finalized my move. I had sent the rent and deposit on a house in Colonia Agua Azul; I had purchased my airline ticket; I had packed up my belongings and paid to have them moved into storage. I was set to go and then he rented a place and began his move. Now, as I think back, I was never sure about the move here but thought that it was just adventure jitters. Yes, I would have lost quite a bit of money if I had backed out then… and I would not have known what I know now had I aborted my plans. I assured myself each day that Hannah would be able to find affordable housing and I would be saving on my small retirement money by moving.

The rent for my beautiful Mexican house is $500.00 monthly with utilities around $60.00 monthly. The cost of food is negligible. What doesn’t drive up to the door in fish and fruit and vegetable trucks can be had at the meat store one door down or at the many tiny stores located every half block.

So, not feeling really excited about the move, I did it anyway. On April 27, 2015, I arrived at the PVR airport with five suitcases to handle on my own. I managed to get out of the airport and into a taxi without too much problem. The heat was powerful and the driver had the windows rolled down and the gas fumes and sea breeze and dust mixed into a recognizable sensory remembrance. This is a Mexico I am familiar with. The sweat began to roll into my eyes and gather under my breasts. Though I had expected the heat and humidity in my head, my body reacted with extreme measures.

The taxi driver asked if I knew where I was going; he had no idea where Agua Azul is located; he ran into the airport for a a map and when he returned, I showed him my new neighborhood. Thank you Google maps. Since I had never been there, I tried to describe the route based on my online Google truck experience. We eventually arrived at the house no worse for wear. Rebecca was waiting and as she opened the door, I threw myself at her, grateful that the Craigslist ad and photos were not a scam. The beautiful yellow house was just as it appeared in the ad and Rebecca in her FaceBook posts. As I walked into the house, it was just like the photos posted in the ad.

Rebecca had lentil soup and iced tea ready for my arrival. I felt completely at ease. Here, I thought, is a sister. We drank iced tea and spent a bit of time chatting. I was too damned hot to eat, though I was starving. She took me out into the street and introduced me around to the neighbors, showed me the stores and we oohed and aawed at the many babies being carried around. A family just kitty corner are 5th generation fishermen. We bought, right then and there, a hunk of tuna right out of the sea. The young man, I forget his name, apologized that he had put it on ice. I paid less than $7.00 for about 12 lbs. of meat. Chela, his grandma, makes tacos every night at 7:30 and sells them for $.70 each until very, very late. The meat store one door down has everything you could ever want.

I was overwhelmed and dead tired and way too hot and sweaty. Rebecca and I ate soup and talked a bit more and I went up to bed, full and feeling… I don’t know… lonely, wondering if I had made the right decision to come here… a whole gamut of thought. Most of all, I wanted Hannah to find the right place to live: a place where Ancel could still ride his bike to school, close to Jack so he could help with Enora, getting her to school and back and to help with Yum Yum.

I slept like a log with ceiling fans whirring and the curtains swaying on the balcony doors.