Ok, been trying to figure out how to post a photo from iPad. I think I got this backwards. Yours, ever learning.

Sent from my iPad

‘I’m going on a cruise!’ she said blithely, ‘twenty seven days for under $2,000! Want to come?’

I was wrung out from the past thirty days since Mom passed on suddenly Christmas Day. The calendar squares for the next several months were filled with scrunchy writing, cross outs and footnotes. (No, I don’t use that gmail calendar. I use scraps of paper, usually ones that I’ve salvaged out of my printer after they’ve jammed.) My question was not ‘To where?’ but ‘When?’

‘The end of April!’ she trilled.

‘Well, I was thinking about getting a face lift  about that time,’ says I,  nothing if not painfully open with what comes into my head. Mortality had been weighing heavily on me. A cruise sounded a lot more restful. And easier to explain. Or justify…to Mom. OK, I still hear her voice in my head. ‘Count me in,’ I said. We made reservations the next day.

And I finally, after these last few months of incredible activity, looked at the itinerary.  I’m in awe of how God takes care of idiots. Or very tired people. I’d been focusing on the first leg of the journey, eight days in the middle of the Atlantic. ‘Just get me that far, and let me decompress,’ I’ve been thinking. But there is actually something beyond that horizon I’ve been looking forward to staring at. This is going to be a wonderful trip! Like a once in a lifetime thing. It is finally registering with me that those ports, Gibraltar, Alicante, Barcelona, Marseille, Livorno, Civitavecchia, Mykonos, Alexandria, Piraeus, Istanbul, Kusadasi, Venice, some of which I’d never heard, give access to the cradles of western civilization. This is that trip I was always going to take….some time in the future. Guess what, amiga? The future is now.

Thanks, Mom.

Two years. It feels like several lifetimes. I’ve done little more in the way of promoting my book than write this blog, visit and stock gringo bookstores here in Mexico, and make a few short tours Stateside.  No paid advertising, no press reviews, no scintillating discussions with Terry Gross or Krista Tippet.  I’ve spent most of these past two years moving from one crisis to another. I’ve come through another operation for my husband, as well as the deaths of both parents. Mom died this past Christmas Day.  She did not like my book. We never spoke of it after she first made her feelings clear to me two years ago.  But over the last months of 2011, we had reached what might be described as a sweet place in our relationship. And then she was gone.

That’s why this blog has lain dormant for a while.  I haven’t known where to restart, or whether there should just be an ending.  I’ve been keeping quiet, listening, praying.  A few mornings back I woke from a dream where I was spinning a filmy cocoon over the events of these last months. I came to a realization. I don’t have to explain anything right now. I don’t have to examine or understand the emotional turmoil. My job right now is to wrap it all in love, put it in a safe place, and wait. I trust someday a butterfly will emerge. Right now I need to get on with life.

Despite my neglect of the past two years, sales of Virgin Territory have continued. There are evidently a lot of women, and quite a few special men who ¨get¨ the Inner Guadalupe thing.  The term is a euphemism for what I call ¨virgin¨ qualities. The original meaning of the Greek word translated virgin in the Bible had nothing to do with physiology. A virgin was someone who was one-in-herself, undefined by any human relationship. She was intact, focused, complete, whole, un-fragmented, the author of her own experience. Therefore, she had authority. That’s why virgins were put in charge of temples, and fountains and flames and such. Virginity, in its original meaning, is a powerful thing. That is true for anyone, no matter what gender. So each month I’ve seen a small deposit from Amazon in my U.S. bank account. Local bookstores and boutiques here in Mexico keep selling the occasional copy. Three or four times the bell has rung on our front gate, and there will be someone, book in hand, who wants me to personalize her copy.  Of the 25 original cartons, only three remain. I am humbly grateful for all of this.  

I will bring one carton with me when I travel from home in Rincón de Guayabitos to San Miguel de Allende when I speak and read at the Literary Sala, April 12. The title of the talk is ‘Getting Naked, Being Clothed.’ It should speak to anyone who has ever felt stripped bare, in whatever sense, and longed to feel fully clothed once more. Every virgin needs a new spring outfit! 

“Maybe going back won’t be so hard,” I reasoned. “U.S. Customs can’t be that stringent about people leaving the country.” I’d heard about Transportes San Miguel, a line that offers cross-the-border service between San Miguel de Allende and Texas. But I could not find any information on how to get in contact with them. Search engines came up with reviews of their service, but not phone numbers. Evidently the majority of their clientele does not book over the internet. Maybe doesn’t book at all, but just shows up.

I went back to the Omnibus Mexicanos terminal in the 400 Block of Broadway in San Antonio. The schedule posted on the internet indicated I’d have to change buses in Queretaro to get back to San Miguel, with quite a layover time. But the girl at the counter told me there was a new service, a bus that left at 1:00 a.m. that went directly to San Miguel. It wouldn’t even stop in Nuevo Laredo, she assured me, but would cross the border and go directly to San Felipe, Dolores Hidalgo (two towns close to San Miguel de Allende) and end up in SMA. There aren’t that many people going this time of year. The bus should be almost empty. Would I like to try that? “Sure,” I said, and  bought a ticket for $77. That was Tuesday afternoon and I showed up Wednesday night – or, actually Thursday morning. I had a few panic attacks about mistaking the date, since my ticket definitely said Wednesday, but it was definitely Thursday that the bus would leave.

At 1:30 a.m., I was among three passengers remaining in the terminal. Fifty or more other people had boarded buses headed to Zamora, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and, finally, I was told to board a bus that had just pulled in. It was labeled “DURANGO,” a direction ninety degrees off the course I’d expected to be headed. Everything would be ok, they assured me. I’d change in Nuevo Laredo. “But…” I began. Never mind. I boarded an overflowing bus, finding a window seat beside a woman who was inexplicably seated on the aisle. Oh, it was her walker that occupied the seat I needed.

I won’t go into graphic detail. I changed buses five times on the trip. The first time was before we even got to Laredo. It was at the twenty-minute coffee stop they make in the middle of that three-hour trip.  I ended up climbing over the lady with the walker three times.  There were five of us on the bus I changed to, headed to Mexico City. At least it was a course correction. The next was at the bus terminal in Laredo, where we found that U.S. Customs had closed the border hasta el amanecer. Until dawn. We sat with about thirty other buses (where did they all come from?) for four hours.

It was full daylight before we crossed the bridge.  A uniformed Mexican official boarded the bus and asked to see our documents. I presented my passport and FM2 card. “Where’s the piece of paper you got when you left Mexico?” he asked. I had no piece of paper. The official who had scanned my documents when I left Mexico had said nothing about getting a piece of paper. The man guarding the entrance back into the country was unsympathetic. “You have to have a piece of paper. How can we keep track of you if you’re not in the system?”  Well, I’d sort of wondered that myself  ten days before. This card business was new. Before I’d had a little paperback book that was dutifully stamped each time I crossed the border.  But who was I to pose questions at 7:30 in the morning after a thirteen-hour bus ride north? Guys in uniforms are supposed to know what they’re doing. (OK, that’s a whole area of discussion we won’t address here.)

“Are you going to let me back in?” I asked plaintively. It wasn’t even in Spanish. I was ready to grovel. He softened and said, “Por supuesto.” Of course. “But get that piece of paper next time. You have to have it.”

Next stop, customs. I was lucky. I hit the green light. The bus driver greeted me on the other side of the building and escorted me back to my bus, lost in a sea of vehicles.

We  stopped for another hour at the terminal in Nuevo Laredo, and again at another customs stop. And I know I changed buses yet again somewhere out in the middle of nowhere where I and my two much-handled bags, my pillow and blankie, my bag of fruit and nuts and a giant handbag were handed over to another capable crew of Omnibus Mexicanos drivers.

The buses were clean and comfortable, the drivers were all well groomed, exceedingly polite, to the point of being gallant. But I was feeling frayed. After one change, I’d been told I’d need to transfer in San Luis Potosi. After another change, I was told the transfer would be in Queretaro. It wasn’t until we stopped for a thirty-minute breakfast somewhere at the crest of a hill near Saltillo, and I engaged the current crop of drivers in a confusing conversation, that I found that I was indeed on a bus headed directly for San Miguel de Allende. I would not have to change again. How do you say Hallelujah in Spanish?

I arrived in San Miguel at 6:30 Thursday evening.  I was the last passenger left on the bus. Their  “new service” evidently hasn’t caught on too well.  Still has a few rough edges, I’d say.

More about bus travel in Mexico:
Wonderful trip on ETN

“Find a seat anywhere,” they told us. “It’s just for crossing the border.” I wedged myself  and my provisions in beside the little old man who had been my across the aisle companion on the way up.  He was as bewildered as I was.  Truth be told, everyone on the bus had that stunned vacant stare reminiscent of movie scenes involving  Germans ushering passengers into cattle cars.  To lighten the mood the driver started a movie.

The Switch was less than entertaining when viewed at a distance of a foot and a half at full volume. The plot involves Jennifer Aniston trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination.  Visual imagery needed no translation in many of the “comedic” scenes.  Turkey baster, anyone?  My seat mate and I dutifully avoided looking at each other.  When the movie was over we were still in line and hadn’t moved an inch. We stayed that way for another forty-five minutes.

I’ll cut to the chase. U. S. Customs goes over every passenger bus with a fine-tooth comb. Passengers disembark with all their belongings, go through a line and everything is x-rayed. Then a dog and a woman go through the bus. Then a huge x-ray machine travels over the bus. I’m so grateful it had cooled off to 80 in Laredo.  The whole process, waiting included took over four hours. Then, after we were back on the bus, we were informed that it would be ANOTHER forty five minutes before we could leave the customs area. There’s some policy about allowing only a few buses to leave at a time. There has to be a twenty minute gap between them…or something like that. Anyway it was like waiting on the runway in the take off line up. We were allowed to disembark and seek refreshment in a sort of no man’s land. There was a guy there selling soda in eight ounce HEB bottles for two bucks a piece.

Once on the bus, we headed for the terminal in Laredo, where we sat for a while. Once on the highway w we  went an hour and a half AND STOPPED FOR A TWENTY MINUTE COFFEE BREAK! Then it was the Border Patrol check point where the bus was boarded and everyone once again presented their passports. Most of the passengers were U.S. citizens, as far as I could tell from the flashes of blue that were waved.

Our previous experience on ETN was great.   I wouldn’t hesitate to do that again. But sometimes the most direct route isn’t the easiest!